Today’s installment of the Media Research Center’s “Best Notable Quotables of 2013,” as selected by our distinguished panel of judges: The Pantsuit Patrol Award, for boosting Hillary Clinton.
Championing Hillary has been a media fixation for decades; 20 years ago, the Best Notable Quotables of 1993 featured the “I Am Woman” award, won that year by then-Time White House correspondent Margaret Carlson, who cooed in a May 10, 1993 article: “Hillary Rodham Clinton will define for women that magical spot where the important work of the world and love and children and an inner life all come together. Like Ginger Rogers, she will do everything her partner does, only backward and in high heels, and with what was missing in [Lee] Atwater — a lot of heart.”
This year’s winners and videos after the jump.
Winning the adoring-Hillary award this year was Newsweek/Daily Beast editor Tina Brown, who gushed in a January 2 article:
“The idea of losing Hillary has seemed especially unbearable at this political moment. It’s as if she has become, literally, the ship of state. She stands for maturity, tenacity, and self-discipline at a time when everyone else in Washington seems to be, in more senses than one, going off a cliff — a parade of bickering, blustering, small-balled hacks bollixing up the nation’s business. She’s a caring executive too, and that takes its own emotional toll. What a disgrace that John Bolton and his goaty Republican ilk accused Her Magnificence of inventing a concussion to get out of testifying at the Benghazi hearings. Bolton is not fit to wipe her floor with his mustache.”
Coming in second: MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, who in February volunteered to provide strategic thinking for Hillary’s next presidential campaign, bringing along his panelists Salon’s Joan Walsh and David Corn of Mother Jones magazine:
Salon’s Joan Walsh: “I think if she [Hillary Clinton] runs again, she really can’t run as that front-runner. It cannot be that inevitability campaign that she ran in 2007, and she knows that. She’s got to be about the future.”
Host Chris Matthews: “If you’re watching, Madam Secretary, all three of us have brilliant ideas. All of us have great ideas. And I especially put myself in that group with Joan and David. We know how to do this, we’ll get you in there.”
Next, newly-hired MSNBC host Ronan Farrow, who sat in on a session of The Cycle on October 29, and actually used the word “honest” to describe Bill and Hillary Clinton:
“They’re nimble politicians. Also I think that they represent a style of honesty that the public craves right now.”
Finally, ABC World News anchor Diane Sawyer showed why Hillary can expect softball treatment from the press if she runs in 2016, as Sawyer used a hearing into her biggest failure as Secretary of State — the fiasco in Benghazi — as an excuse to salute her “fiery” testimony at a hearing that day:
“Last stand. Secretary Hillary Clinton, filled with fiery emotion in her last appearance before Congress....The indignation. And then, the tears in her eyes....It was a valedictory that showed her indignation and emotion as she ends this tenure on the public stage.”
Tomorrow: this year’s nastiest media attacks on the Tea Party. The full report, with 15 categories plus the judges' selection of Quote of the Year, is available at: www.MRC.org.
Want to receive Notable Quotables every two weeks via e-mail in 2014? Sign up here.
