Jeff Greenfield Has New Slogan For Imus

CBS News's Jeff Greenfield came to just one conclusion after listening to a clip of baseball analyst and former player Tim McCarver crooning in the style of Ol' Blue Eyes.

"I like Frank Sinatra as a singer, and Tim McCarver as a baseball announcer," he said.

He doesn't so much like President Obama as a Nobel Peace Prize winner either, and suspects much of the country — if not the world — agrees.

"I think everybody's first reaction was, for what?" he said, to news that Obama had been awarded the prize so early in his first term as President. "I don't think there's anything bad about it, except it's a little awkward."

Most other Nobel Peace Prize winners, he added, had embarked on a long journey toward peace, or human rights, or ending longstanding conflicts. Not so with Obama, who he surmised was awarded the Prize simply to congratulate Americans on voting for somebody besides George W. Bush.

Greenfield thinks the idea laid out in yesterday's New York Times by Tom Friedman — that Obama should dedicate the award to American servicemen and women around the world — is intrguing, considering the spotlight presently on Obama.

"If you win the Nobel Peace Prize and a few months later you send 40 to 50,000 soldiers there, that's an interesting coupling," said Greenfield.

Greenfield commented on the extent to which politics often figured into decisions made by Presidents Kennedy and Johnson when it came to the Vietnam War.

"Throughout even the early stages, there was constant pressure on Kennedy from the military," said Greenfield. There are also "terrifying tapes" of Johnson expressing fear that the political costs of backing down would be very high.

"The one thing you hope is that whatever decision is made, they've managed to understand what disasters happened when we let the politics of the situation drive the decisions," Greenfield added.

America's flaw, he hypothesized, is that "we tend to think that every nation is kind of like us." Johnson, he added, "used to think, if only he could persuade the North Vietnamese to accept damned dams, and road building, and schools, that they would put aside their thousand years of nationalism."

Greenfield isn't sure who Obama listens to, but he's quite certain it's not, as Imus suggested, Glenn Beck. Speaking of Fox News personalities, Greenfield suggested a new tagline for Imus on the Fox Business Network: "We distort, we deride."

Imus was upset that Greenfield would insult his employer, but Greenfield clarified: "That's the theme of your show," he told the I-Man. "That's not FOX — that's YOU!"

-Julie Kanfer