Ellen Ratner is the White House Correspondent and Bureau Chief for The Talk Radio News Service, covering the White House and providing exclusive reports to talk radio stations from the Congress and government agencies. Ms. Ratner is a news analyst on The Fox News Channel where she has a weekly segment entitled "The Long and Short of It" with Jim Pinkerton. She is heard on over 500 stations across the United States representing individual stations as well as syndicated shows on both commercial and public radio venues. In addition she writes a weekly column "Liberal and Proud" for World Net Daily. She developed the podcasting site, www.newstalkcast.com, which is currently in beta testing. She is also the only talk show host granted two in-person interviews with President Clinton.
Ratner is the political editor and Washington bureau chief for Talkers Magazine, the "bible" of the talk industry. In addition, she has developed College Media News, a broadcast service for college and university radio stations, served by students interning in Washington, DC. In the capacity as Political Editor of Talkers Magazine, she developed the concept of combining radio rows with immediate Internet access via the site, www.radiorow.net. In addition, she has trained many groups in use of radio, television and Internet media. Her latest book, Getting On! Talk Radio, Talk Television, Talk Internet, will be published in November, 2005.
A native of Cleveland, Ohio, Ratner graduated from Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont. She earned a Masters Degree in Education from Harvard University.
From 1973 to 1986, Ratner served as co-director and co-founder of Boundaries Therapy Center, in Acton, MA. Also, from 1974 to 1981, Ratner was the Director of the Psychiatric Day Treatment Program at South Shore Mental Center in Quincy, MA. In 1984, Ratner joined the Addiction Recovery Corporation as a Consultant on Program Development. From 1986 to 1990, Ratner served as Vice-President of Research, Development, and Service at the Addiction Recovery Corporation and as Director of its ARC Research Foundation. She served as Principal Investigator for an outcome research study, determining treatment outcome factors in alcoholism and chemical dependency treatment.
Ratner is the author of The Other Side of the Family: A Book for Recovery from Abuse, Incest and Neglect (Health Communications, Inc.), published in 1990. In February 1997, Ratner published "101 Ways to Get Your Progressive Ideas on Talk Radio," published by National Press Books and Talkers Magazine.
I often wear two hats, one as a reporter who covers Washington and the White House and one as an opinion journalist who makes her living giving opinions. I am often asked why a politician responds in a certain way, ways that often make no sense to the general public.
The radio stations I report for range from conservative to liberal, with most leaning on the conservative side. Most weeks, the questions are related to why so-and-so are not in the presidential race or why someone took a particular position on a bill. This week, the questions were related to the president and the attorney general. The radio hosts, conservative and liberal alike, wanted to know why the president was hanging onto the attorney general.
There really can only be three answers. The first is that Attorney General Gonzales knows something about the president and the White House that would lead to impeachment of the president for something he did that was blatantly unconstitutional, or even criminal. Though many of my friends are convinced the president's actions regarding the war are impeachable offenses, there is no evidence that the attorney general is hiding information about the war. I can't believe that Gonzales really has anything on President Bush that we don't already know about.
The second reason is that the president has only 18 months in his term, and a nomination fight in the Senate would bring all of the dysfunction of the Justice Department, as well as failed policies, front and center in the evening news. The "parade of horribles" would include spying on Americans, high staff turnover and how polices are made at Main Justice. Not exactly what the Bush administration would like to have sitting in front of Joe and Sally America.
The third is that the president has a real personality flaw. I ascribe to this theory. Given the week's events and the testimony of the attorney general before the Senate Judiciary Committee, there is no senior manager I know who would hold on to him. Gonzales's testimony was completely contradicted by FBI Director Robert Mueller. Mueller said it was about the terrorist surveillance program, and the attorney general said there was no departmental disagreement. This is on top of hours and hours of evasive testimony concerning the scandal on the firings of the U.S. attorneys. Then we have the midnight visit to the former attorney general in his hospital room and the lies he told about that. If that was not enough for the president to send a pink slip to Gonzales, then how about the huge staff turnover at Main Justice? Liar or lousy manager, he just doesn't belong there.
So why does the president hang on? It can only be his personality structure. Many people LOVE this about the president. He means what he says and says what he means. He won't back down etc. etc. This is what got him elected but makes him a poor president. There are many theories as to why he is like this, and historians and psychologists will be arguing for years to come about President Bush's personality. My summation is that he is a classic dry drunk – someone who is an untreated, but dry, alcoholic often referred to in Alcoholic's Anonymous as "white knuckle sobriety." Basically, someone whose obsessive compulsive personality kept him drinking, denying reality, seeing the world in a very rigid manner and often thinking in a grandiose fashion. There are a few other characteristics of this kind of sobriety, and one of them is extreme rationalization.
Looking at the attorney general situation and meshing that with the president's personality, it becomes clear that even in the face of opposition in his own party, even in the face of facts of bad management, the president holds on. He is denying reality, holding on to his appointed choice for the job with a rigidity rarely seen in politics or business management. He believes in a very grandiose fashion that, as president, he can thumb his nose at the will of Congress. Had the president received treatment for alcoholism 20 years ago, he would have been introduced to the ways and means of the Serenity Prayer: "God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference." With Congress calling for a special prosecutor for the nation's top cop and an impending constitutional battle, we could all be saved from this mess. If only the president had courage to change and the wisdom that went along with it.