Fumbling the Big One

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, December 3, 2008 9:40 AM

NEW YORK -- The story has everything: fame, wealth, weapons, arrogance and allegations of special treatment.

Forget about Hillary, Iraq, Citigroup and the auto bailout that has the Big Three CEOs driving hybrids and offering to work for a buck a year, which means that hell has officially frozen over. They've got nothing on the man the tabloids call PLAX.

Plaxico Burress, a star receiver for the world champion New York Giants, had it pretty good. A new, $35 million contract, a worshipful press, a paid radio gig on WFAN, and all he had to do was show up and catch footballs 26 times a year and maybe in a few playoff games.

So what does he do? Carries a loaded, unlicensed gun into a nightclub, shoots himself in the leg and blows up his career.

"PLAX GUN RAGE," says the New York Post.

"LOCK HIM UP!" screams the Daily News.

The latter was a reference to the "outraged" mayor, Mike Bloomberg, calling for the authorities to throw the book at Burress. Especially after it was revealed that New York-Cornell hospital broke the rules by not disclosing that Burress, admitted under an alias, was treated for a gunshot wound.

Can you imagine throwing it all away just to pack some heat? The Giants fined and suspended Burress yesterday for the remainder of the season, and he could face a three-year prison term.

Maybe I've just gotten sucked into the tabloid culture here. At the moment, Plax is a bigger story than Obama. Sure it's overplayed. Everything is overplayed in New York. But talk about self-inflicted wounds. What a yarn.

I've been bird-dogging the David Gregory story since it hit the blogs, and here's what I've been able to nail down:

NBC is in advanced negotiations with David Gregory to become the moderator of "Meet the Press" and could announce the move as early as Sunday, when Tom Brokaw hopes to wind up his temporary stint on the program, according to network executives familiar with the situation.

The decision, if not derailed at the last minute, would place the network's lucrative franchise in the hands of a journalist who has been a chief White House correspondent, cable news host, frequent fill-in on "Today" and accomplished mimic who has dared to dance on the air. The challenge for Gregory would be to fill the considerable void left by Tim Russert, who turned "Meet the Press" into a top-rated interrogation ritual during a 17-year run that ended with his death in June.

"We have nothing to announce," NBC spokeswoman Allison Gollust said yesterday. Gregory, 38, declined to comment. The sources, confirming a report this week in the Huffington Post, would discuss private personnel matters only on condition of anonymity.

The other leading contender for the job has been Chuck Todd, NBC's political director, who has blossomed into the network's premier political analyst since the primaries began in January, despite a lack of previous television experience. It is not clear how Gregory's ascension would affect Todd's role, which had also been filled by Russert.

NBC had considered an ensemble format that could have included Gregory, Todd, NBC's Andrea Mitchell and PBS's Gwen Ifill as a way to avoid a tough choice, but the network eventually decided against it, sources said.

Gregory clearly has the requisite journalistic experience and is accustomed to verbal sparring. As a White House reporter, he frequently clashed with President Bush's spokesmen and became a constant target for conservatives who viewed his aggressive style as partisanship. After Vice President Cheney accidentally shot a hunting companion, Gregory scolded press secretary Scott McClellan: "Don't tell me you're giving us complete answers when you're not actually answering the question." On another occasion, Gregory said: "Don't be a jerk to me personally when I'm asking you a serious question." Gregory later apologized to McClellan.

As a substitute co-host on "Today," Gregory displayed an easy on-air manner that meshed well with the morning-television genre. He received additional training this year as host of the MSNBC talk show "Race for the White House" -- now "1600 Pennsylvania Avenue" -- and was tapped as moderator during major political events after the cable network decided that Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews were too opinionated for that role.

Skeptics say that Gregory has a less-than-commanding screen presence as a host, leading them to question whether he could sustain viewer interest in the hour-long Sunday program. The son of a Broadway producer, he might need a bit more showmanship.

NBC also has to weigh the possibility that, if Gregory is passed over, he might leave when his contract expires next year. ABC is said to be interested in him.

As an 18-year-old freshman at American University, Gregory cut a deal with the ABC affiliate in Tucson to use him as a Washington correspondent. He joined NBC as a Chicago-based correspondent in 1996. Bush nicknamed the 6-foot-5 correspondent "Stretch" early in his tenure and later downgraded him to "Little Stretch."

If Gregory is tapped, it would set off a chain reaction in which NBC would likely want to craft a prominent role for the popular Todd and MSNBC would need a new 6 p.m. host. The leading contender for Gregory's White House job appears to be NBC correspondent Samantha Guthrie.

A Gregory promotion would represent an opportunity and a challenge for ABC's George Stephanopoulos, whose program, "This Week," is second in the ratings, behind "Meet the Press." Ratings for all the Sunday shows are expected to decline next year, in the wake of the yearlong drama of a presidential election.

I led off yesterday with how conservatives are grudgingly giving credit to President-in-Waiting Barack Obama. Rich Lowry is the latest:

"Barack Obama's leftward positioning and achingly idealistic rhetoric in the Democratic primaries harkened back to George McGovern or Robert Kennedy. His personnel choices during the transition instead recall Michael Dukakis, the Massachusetts technocrat who notoriously ran on competence. Obama is too savvy a marketer to have tried to make a campaign slogan out of practicality. But who would have guessed that when he lit up the crowd back in 2007 at Iowa's Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner with his signature speech denouncing the ways of Washington and Democrats who accommodated Bush foreign policy, he harbored a secret desire to draw on experienced Republicans to manage his national-security policy?

"Obama has selected a former Marine commandant close to John McCain, Gen. Jim Jones, as his national-security adviser; asked President George W. Bush's defense secretary, Bob Gates, to stay on; and selected Hillary Clinton, a relative centrist who denounced Obama's naiveté in the primaries, as secretary of state.

"It's as moderate as any Democrat's national-security picks could possibly get. Just when it seemed that the hawkish Scoop Jackson wing of the Democratic Party was dead forever, a jerry-built version of it is making a comeback via the impending administration of a man championed by anti-war zealots. Yes, God does have a sense of humor."

Actually, the signals were there all along. But you can't expect conservatives to say they misread Obama, so most are depicting him as lurching to the right.

Hillary continues to fascinate the media, as she has since 1992, so we might as well get used to it.

"Is this the end of Hillary? Will she no longer be the bright star, blazing her own path across the political skies?" asks Roger Simon.

"Drama and Hillary seem to go hand in hand, though this is not always her fault. Her husband seems the source of much of it. The negotiations between the Obama campaign and Hillary were protracted. True, Obama was getting a superstar. True, he was getting a well-qualified secretary of state who will have no trouble being approved by the Senate. But it was reported that Clinton made several demands, including the ability to pick her own staff without anyone's approval. Could this really be true? If so, it is a mistake.

"When it came to picking her most recent staff -- the staff of her presidential campaign -- she made disastrous choices, picking people with little or no presidential campaign experience and a near total lack of discipline. She chose a staff that never understood either the central motivation of voters in 2008 (a desire for change) or the mechanics of how to win the nomination. Let's hope Obama exercises quiet, behind-the-scenes but firm control over who will be part of Clinton's staff at the State Department."

The New Republic's Michael Crowley cites speculation "that elevating Susan Rice's U.N. ambassador job to cabinet level is a kind of shot across Hillary's bow. Maybe. But a smart foreign-policy watcher I know makes a different point: That Obama has created a new foreign policy power center amid an existing surplus of strong figures (Biden, Hillary, Gates, Jones) in that mix. On the flip side, Rice may well have trouble competing with Madame Secretary if it comes to that: 'In turf battles Hillary will eat Rice for lunch,' says this person, noting that of the five foreign policy appointees onstage today, Rice's resume is by far the thinnest."

Slate's Emily Yoffe goes beyond diplomacy in her analysis:

"Isn't it time for Hillary Clinton to get a quickie divorce from Bill (it can be done; it took about 20 minutes for Madonna to dissolve her marriage) before her confirmation hearings start? The New York Times reports that over the last few weeks of negotiations between Obama's representatives and Bill, he has agreed to various restrictions on his business and philanthropic dealings to keep Hillary from getting mired in a bunch of scandals and conflicts. He promises to 'submit his future personal speeches and business activities for review by State Department ethics officials and, if necessary, by the White House counsel's office.' Yeah, that should work, because if we know anything about Bill Clinton it's that a) He responds well to being on a short leash, and b) He's really good at filing timely paperwork.

"Surely Hillary will not have trouble getting confirmed, but her hearings will be all about Bill -- Sen. Richard Lugar virtually promises that. As her presidential campaign made clear, not only does Hillary not need Bill anymore, he has turned into a liability (except financially, and she would come away with a big settlement). And just think, if she divorced him, it would be the first time that their relationship made sense."

Even on the hostile Upper West Side, the following scenario can hardly be what Bush's closest aide had in mind when his boss's presidency began:

"Karl Rove -- the architect, the one-time senior White House adviser to President Bush -- walked into the lion's den Tuesday night to argue that his former boss is not the worst president of the past 50 years," the Washington Times reports.

And, in case you thought that network anchors are judged solely on their journalistic skills, this breaking news from the Daily News:

"If it ain't broke, don't fix it, Katie.

"Just when Katie Couric was hitting her stride, she tripped up Monday night -- with a hair-raising new look that put the 'ew' in the evening news.

"The coif, a boyish pixie cut that channeled some of Hillary Clinton's bad 'do days, was a striking departure from the signature bob viewers associate with the 51-year-old anchor.

"The dramatic chop did little to flatter and even caused Couric's face to appear different. Sideswiped bangs -- that shifted throughout the newscast -- first made one eyebrow arch menacingly, then hid it altogether."

No word, somehow, on the Gibson and Williams coifs.