Kurt Andersen

Maureen Dowd’s column today is about the Barak Obama fundraising party thrown last night by David Geffen, Jeffrey Katzenberg and Steven Spielberg at Geffen’s house in Beverly Hills. Unlike other Democrats, who are excited by Obama partly because they think he’s more electable than Hillary Clinton, Geffen thinks his party has a lock on the 2008 election: “Whoever is the nominee is going to win.” People of all ideological stripes, evidently, are susceptible to slam-dunk overoptimism.

The column is also filled with extraordinarily impolitic quotes about the Clintons — a suggestion that Bill Clinton is still recklessly horndogging, that the Hillary “machine” is going to be “very unpleasant and unattractive,” that both lie “with such ease, it’s troubling.”

The Clintons and Geffen used to be mutually, passionately smitten. At one Clinton White House dinner, I learned from a friend who sat at the president’s table along with Geffen and George Kennan, Clinton simply ignored Kennan — the éminence grise who masterminded our successful “containment” policy toward the Soviets — in order to gossip with Geffen about Hollywood.

So what made Geffen fall out of love? According to Dowd, it was because Bill Clinton refused to grant a presidential pardon to federal prison inmate Leonard Peltier. Peltier is the 62-year-old “Native American activist” who was convicted of killing two FBI agents in 1975 on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota.

That is enough to abandon a president and beloved pal? The Hollywood political bubble is even more peculiar that I’d imagined.

Obligatory Heyday connection: the story is set mainly in 1848, and several of the novel’s characters travel west by wagon train into Indian country, passing through Sioux country. At the time, Beverly Hills and the rest of California had just become part of America, thanks to the Mexican War.