A few things I left out of my piece on Newt’s speech at the Cooper Union:
He told the crowd that he “literally ran into Rudy [Giuliani] this afternoon walking down the street.” That sounds about right. We New Yorkers are constantly running into the former mayor everywhere we go. I personally can’t seem to get away from the guy.
He recommended John O’Sullivan’s new book, The President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister, among others.
He suggested that “a country that did not insist on putting its secrets on page one of the New York Times would in fact be able to have industrial sabotage” against Iran’s only oil refinery, which would render Iran dependent on imported gasoline and hasten the collapse of the current regime.
Also, I didn’t comment much on the substance of former New York governor Mario Cuomo’s remarks, but Scott Johnson’s description is accurate:
Mario Cuomo dusted off the notes from his 1984 “tale of two cities” keynote speech at the Democratic Party’s San Francisco convention. I remember watching him give that speech in the hospital room where my wife was recoverning from the birth of our first daughter over 22 years ago. Cuomo indicted supply side economics, offered tax increases on the rich as the recipe for prosperity, lamented the growth of poverty and hardship on the middle class, and decried the administration’s reckless foreign policy. Suffice it to say that Cuomo’s walk down memory lane lacked the inspirational quality of Campbell’s and Holzer’s.
And Newt’s.