PBS anchor and Wichita native Jim Lehrer has taken a lot of grief for losing control of last week’s presidential debate. So what did he think of the debate and its new format? “All of the discussion, it seemed to me, was about things that mattered,” he told the Washington Post. “They weren’t talking about things off in the margins. They were talking about things that truly divide them.” Lehrer said he was initially frustrated when the candidates ignored him, but then decided that wasn’t important. “It isn’t about my power, my control or whatever,” he said. “It was about what the candidates were doing, what they were talking about and what impression they were leaving with the voters. That’s what this is about.”
U.S. Rep. Tim Huelskamp, R-Fowler, tried another tack last week in his war on the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s new calorie limits on school lunches – asking the USDA to practice in its own cafeterias what it’s preaching to U.S. schools. “Let’s see if they eat enough to function. Let’s see if they like having choices taken away from them,” Huelskamp said in issuing his “nutrition nanny challenge.” A USDA spokeswoman responded: “Schools may still sell and students may still purchase servings of any type of food in addition to the subsidized meals, but it’s just common sense that the meal paid for with hard-earned tax dollars be a healthy, balanced meal.” The Hill newspaper noted that one USDA cafeteria’s breakfast options last week include Belgian waffles, scrambled eggs, sausage, biscuits, sausage gravy, corned-beef hash, pancakes and French toast.
“For a long time after my loss to Bill Clinton in 1996, I would lie awake nights wondering what I could have done to change the outcome,” Bob Dole wrote in a Washington Post commentary about life after losing a presidential campaign. “Did we rely too much on the Republican base, letting cultural issues define us in a harsh light and driving away independents and suburban voters?” But he eventually realized that “brooding over what might have been is self-defeating.” Dole said that greeting Honor Flights veterans at the World War II Memorial in Washington, D.C., helps remind him of how “the greatest of life’s blessings cannot be counted in electoral votes.” As for his post-defeat career as a TV pitchman, Dole said that any second thoughts he may have entertained about being a Viagra spokesman were “put to rest by a couple of wives who approached me in airports to say, simply, ‘Thank you, Senator.’”
PBS anchor and Wichita native Jim Lehrer has taken a lot of grief for losing control of last week’s presidential debate. So what did he think of the debate and its new format? “All of the discussion, it seemed to me, was about things that mattered,” he told the Washington Post. “They weren’t talking about things off in the margins. They were talking about things that truly divide them.” Lehrer said he was initially frustrated when the candidates ignored him, but then decided that wasn’t important. “It isn’t about my power, my control or whatever,” he said. “It was about what the candidates were doing, what they were talking about and what impression they were leaving with the voters. That’s what this is about.”
