Naked senators, Dick Cheney downing fried chicken and a “hobo” Fed chairman. Former senator Arlen Specter’s new book, “Life Among the Cannibals,” has its moments.
On Tuesday, we brought you the squirm-inducing revelation from its pages that Specter thought vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin “radiated sensuality.”
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For those who can’t get enough hotness from Arlen, here’s more:
He has seen Ted Kennedy naked (p. 67). “For years when [people] groused about Senate perks, I’d reply, ‘You wouldn’t say that if you had to see Ted Kennedy naked in the gym.’ ”
More naked Teddy (p. 40): “It was in the whirlpool . . . in 2008 . . . when Ted Kennedy came over and climbed into the bath. Kennedy was one of the Senate’s giants, in many ways. It was as though a giant walrus had plunged into the sea, causing the level to swell.”
And then there’s this (p. 226) on Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.): “John Thune, who looked like a movie star in or out of clothes, was constantly stretching. His lanky body seemed to have some kinks to iron out.”
And also this (p.68): Senate-gym protocol apparently calls for waiting your turn for a massage — but an unnamed colleague broke the unwritten rules. “I was walking undressed to the last [massage] table. Another senator, also naked, walked briskly, perhaps at a slight run, and slipped ahead of me. That was something senators just don’t do,” Specter wrote.
For those not into naked senators, he writes:
In 2000, soon-to-be-vice-president Cheney (p.65) dined with Specter in the senator’s hideaway office. “I worried when he ordered fried chicken, after just suffering his fourth heart attack. But he devoured the bird, even dropping a piece that left a stain on the white carpet,” he wrote.
And Ben Bernanke dresses like a “hobo” (p. 75). Specter, a natty dresser himself, ran into the Fed chairman at a Phillies-Nationals game at RFK Stadium. “I saw a bearded man in scruffy blue jeans, a baseball cap obscuring most of his face. He looked like a hobo.”
Etch a what?
A new poll offers further proof that, yes, the Washington media live in a bubble.
The uproar over Mitt Romney adviser Eric Fehrnstrom’s Etch a Sketch comment last week — that the GOP presidential candidate’s conservative stances will shift if he wins the nomination — was intense.
The gaffe dominated the news for days. Rivals Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich brandished the plastic toys at televised campaign events — even handing them out at rallies — to highlight their accusations that Romney is not a true conservative and that he flips and flops more than that freshly caught fish in the bottom of your bass boat.
But despite all the hoopla, all that grave chin-stroking about the potential implications, a Pew Research Center poll taken last week and released Tuesday found that fewer than half of those surveyed, about 44 percent, had even heard about Fehrnstrom’s comment. What’s more, among those who had, not all that much was changed.
The survey found that 8 percent of Republicans said the remark would make them less likely to support Romney.
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