Martin Eisenstadt’s Blog

I’ve been in the new adjunct office of the Harding Institute in New York for the last week or two, and it’s been a crazy time. My mother, Connie Bean Eisenstadt, has always told me, “All press is good press, Marty…just so long as the words ‘unindicted co-conspirator’ don’t precede your name.” (You can tell this was a Washington woman who knew her Haldeman’s from her Ehrlichman’s.) So being in the New York Times, and all the media that’s come from that, should be a time for celebration, and in a strange way, it may all wind up being for the better. But for now, let me just expose a little bit of my frustration…

Just today, I headed over to the Gray Lady herself in an futile effort to demand some sort of retraction (turns out they’re more mad than me about the Yes Men hoax), but on my way out, I bumped into my old frenemies Thomas Friedman and Paul Krugman, so we grabbed a coffee together. I congratulated Paul on his Nobel this year, and commiserated with Tom that neither of us had won ours yet. (Tom’s not a bad photographer, either.)
They tried cheering me up about the recent rumors of my non-existence. Paul recounted the story of the attractive young woman who came up to him recently and said how much she loved reading him in the Times. He was flattered, but when she added that “The World Is Flat” is her favorite book, he realized she’d mistaken him for the Fried-ster. So much for the legendary “Nobel Booty Bounce.”

Now, I’m hardly ideological bedfellows with the boys, but we all go back years, and in starting to come to grips with the new Obamocracy that we’re in, it’s clearly in my best interest to reach out to the new regime. Tom, in particular, had some good suggestions on ways to reinvigorate myself and the mission of the Harding Institute in these times. As I was leaving, he even gave me the cell number for his book publisher. So who knows?