LIZ: Do you know there’s no celebrity news to speak of? That’s why Michael Jackson’s death was such a big event while it lasted. The new celebrity is politics. Politics is all people really are talking about, in my opinion.

JUDITH: Ah, you’ve finally come around to the Washington point of view.

LIZ: Exactly.

MARY: Well, society’s disappeared …

LIZ: The new celebrities, the performing celebrities, are mostly people nobody over 40 ever heard of, and we haven’t gotten used to them yet. And none of them are great stars or great characters in the tradition of the MGM days.

MARY: No. They’re all gone.

JONI: Well, at least we have Sarah Palin. Will she be a politician one year from now?

LIZ: Well she won’t be an Alaskan anymore. That’s what I predict. I mean, I think she’s about to shake the ice off of her feet. I think she’ll still be a name, because for one thing she’s physically very pretty and attractive; and she’s either irritating to people or they’re slavishly addicted to her. So she’s got all of the ingredients necessary to become a fixture.

MARY: Also, the Democrats are being very smart about her. They are pushing her. They are driving her to the top of the charts. They are literally making her a much bigger star than she is, because they want her to stand for Republicanism, and they want everybody to associate her with Republicanism.

LIZ: Judith, what do you think?

JUDITH: A star, but not a star politician. She made a lot of enemies in her own party and I think Mary’s quite right. She’s the ideal opponent to run against because she is extremely accident-prone in the intellectual department.

MARY: She’s perfect.

JUDITH: But she’s made enormous enemies in her own party.

MARY: She could literally drown the Republican Party in the next 12 months, little by little.

JUDITH: It will be interesting to see if people take her up on her offer to campaign for them. I would think that they would run away.

LIZ: Well, she spoke at the Reagan Library recently. I think she’s just starting out.

JONI: I just wanted to say that I think everyone has underestimated what she’s going to be one year from now, and I think she’s formidable. I think she has time now to educate herself, and I wouldn’t rule her out on anything.

LIZ: We ruled Nixon out and that was a big mistake, because he appealed to that whole victimhood thing on people who feel they’re so badly used. That’s her theory. She is preaching the doctrine of cultural resentment. And these days lots of people suffer from that. They enjoy being victims.

MARY: I think there’s a crazy streak in her. And I think she’ll be forgiven anything because everybody likes the way it’s going.

LIZ: She’s fun. In a world without any big names anymore, except big political names, she’s getting bigger all the time.

MARY: And an awful lot of big-time people are crazy.

JONI: Now, with Walter Cronkite gone … I remember the way the media used to be. We’ll miss Walter Cronkite and his authoritative ways.

LIZ: He never made the kind of mistakes Alessandra Stanley made in The New York Timeswhen she wrote about him in her appreciation and made seven glaring errors. I think I would have been fired if that had been me writing that. And I was fired and I didn’t even write anything like that. You know, that comic guy, Bill Maher, said it best. He said, "People have forgotten that when Walter Cronkite was doing the news, the news was a loss leader in television." The news wasn’t expected to make any money. So if he wanted to really cover some story substantially he did, and he didn’t have producers screaming and saying, "Don’t do that. You’ve got to make money. You’ve got to put Farrah Fawcett-Majors on."