Waitress tells campaign reporters: ‘You people are really nuts’

November 9, 2007

It’s hard to say for sure when the “silly season” started in the media’s coverage of the presidential campaign. If there was a “serious season,” it was exceedingly short. I’m afraid I missed it.

But yesterday was unusually inane. A waitress at an Iowa diner noted that Hillary Clinton and her campaign aides had recently stopped by, but didn’t leave a tip. NPR picked up on the “story,” the New York Times called it a “potentially embarrassing mini-scandal,” and Drudge blared it above the fold. Soon after, NBC News and ABC News were trumpeting the story.

Clinton didn’t leave a tip? Does she hate working people? Is she out of touch? What does this say about her economic plan? What do her rivals think about this? Why won’t Barack Obama attack her over the issue? Is it too soon to put a poll in the field gauging the public’s reaction?

All of this breathless fascination was for naught. It turned out Clinton’s campaign did leave a tip with the manager for the entire serving staff. Clinton’s individual waitress didn’t know that, so there was a simple misunderstanding.

Reporters ended up contacting the waitress, Anita Esterday, at her home in Iowa yesterday.

Ms. Esterday said she did not understand what all the commotion was about.

“You people are really nuts,” she told a reporter during a phone interview. “There’s kids dying in the war, the price of oil right now — there’s better things in this world to be thinking about than who served Hillary Clinton at Maid-Rite and who got a tip and who didn’t get a tip.”

Thank you, Anita Esterday. “You people are really nuts” may actually be the most helpful and poignant media criticism I’ve seen this year. It has the added benefit of being true.

It’s also a reminder of just what it takes to get some political reporters excited. Last week, Rudy Giuliani unveiled a campaign ad in Iowa with an obvious, demonstrable lie. Many of us begged reporters to take it seriously, and give it the full-court press.

Some columnists noted the problem, but most outlets followed the AP’s lead: “No one argues that Rudy Giuliani was diagnosed with prostate cancer, underwent treatment and survived. Yet there is a dispute about the statistics he quotes about his chances of survival.”

A “dispute,” as if there was some question about whether Giuliani had intentionally lied to voters in an ad.

Was there a media freak-out? Not even a little. A leading candidate deceiving the public about cancer just isn’t sexy enough.

And what is? In recent months, the most prominent media frenzies have dealt with John Edwards’ hair, Hillary Clinton’s laugh, Rudy Giuliani’s cell phone, and now Clinton’s approach to gratuities.

“You people are really nuts” sums the situation up nicely, doesn’t it?

Journalism: the major you transfer to after you flunk out of social worker school (no slam on social workers, it’s just the held-in-low-esteem-by-the-public job I could think of off the top of my head to put the media in their proper location, we could also do) Journalism: what you do when you get fired as a gaws-pump jockey.

  • Give that waitress a raise and royalties the t-shirt sales “You People Are Really Nuts” Tees.

  • “You people are really nuts,” she told a reporter during a phone interview. “There’s kids dying in the war, the price of oil right now — there’s better things in this world to be thinking about than who served Hillary Clinton at Maid-Rite and who got a tip and who didn’t get a tip.”

    here’s a thought. maybe move-on could take out a full-page ad with this quote on it. i’d contribute toward the cost. (and we’ll pay full price this time! 🙂 )

  • turned out Clinton’s campaign did leave a tip with the manager for the entire serving staff.

    According to the follow-up I heard on NPR, a staffer at first claimed that the tip was paid by credit card. When told that was unlikely, the staffer said oh wait it was a $100 bill. The story doesn’t add up.

    But since it has exactly no relevance to the campaign, there’s no reason to pursue it.

    The original NPR report also had a story about Barack Obama who promised to write a woman a letter. She says she never got one — but that doesn’t matter, because all she wanted was for him to listen to her, and he did.

  • For years (ever since Reagan) I’ve been saying that reporters are ignorant, lazy, juvenile, celeb-awed, prep-school pals who didn’t deserve the status and money TeeVee gave them, as opposed to the ill-kempt, alcoholic, seedy, rude underpaid bums who used to make up the press corps and served us quite well.

    Anita says it better: “You people are really nuts. There’s kids dying in the war, the price of oil right now — there’s better things in this world to be thinking about than who served Hillary Clinton at Maid-Rite and who got a tip and who didn’t get a tip.”

    On behalf of candidates everywhere, Hillary should put Anita on a generous salary.

  • Guilliani’s cell phone, at least, seemed to be faked, which is mildly interesting. It seems like family dog tied to the car story would be the “Invented the Internet” of the campaign season in an irrational but non-partisan world. In fairness, a Gore-like conventional wisdom about Thompson’s laziness appears to have taken hold, so it’s a start…

  • It takes a regular schlump to have the sense to tell all these assholes that real shit is more important than these gossip stories. All the rightwing-hawk-males must be experiencing serious congintive dissonance now.

  • NPR picked up on the “story,” the New York Times called it a “potentially embarrassing mini-scandal,”

    Wow– thanks, NPR and NYT, for stooping to the level of stupid. I guess whoever makes the decisions over at those places came from a more blue-blooded background than Hillary, so naturally they are waiting for her to prove to be a neanderthal troglodyte. You just can’t breed out neanderthal blood; not in ten generations.

  • Wonder how much press our putative Presidents will get for failing to show up for the Mukasey confirmation vote?

    Mukasey was confirmed in the Senate by a vote of 53-40.

    That all of the Senators running for President never bothered to show up for is bad, that no Democrat bothered to vote on this is worse.


  • just bill: here’s a thought. maybe move-on could take out a full-page ad with this quote on it. i’d contribute toward the cost. (and we’ll pay full price this time!

    How dare you call the troops nuts! STOP THE PRESSES AGAIN!!!

  • I’m still waiting for the story to break about how Giuliani located the NYC terrorism command post in the World Trade Center complex so that he could walk over there from his office for afternoon trysts with his mistress.

    Or is that “old news” already?

  • The follow-up NPR story included sound from her, but didn’t include any suggestion that she thought the hoopla was nuts, just that she got no money. Though it did include her saying that, if a tip had been left to share, she doubted the other waitresses, who she’s known for years would have kept it from her.

    The host also asked the reporter if, before airing Esterday saying “nobody got a tip”, he should have confirmed that. He said he probably should have contacted the Clinton campaign first to get their side of it.

    It apparently didn’t occur to him that he might have actually asked the other waitresses if they got a tip, or check with the manager to see if a group tip was left. No, his journalistic instinct was to get another side for a “he said/she said”, not find out what really happened.

    NPR’s reporting has really veered toward infotainment in recent years.

  • Well, it was clear something had to change when that PEW poll showed NPR viewers were the best informed about issues of fact concerning the Iraq War. As I recall, not a single Democrat who primarily got their news from NPR thought we found WMD.

  • Once you know why the media stoops to the levels it does, it’s a lot easier to understand their motivation. They are told by their bosses that a) they have to “scoop” the other news outlets, and b) the news room is being downsized. The only way to square that circle is to crank out fluff. Luckily for the commercial outlets, the idiots who are dumb enough to fall for the advertisements which actually pay for the whole mess, they hate “hard stories” and they LOVE fluff.

    What’s NPR’s excuse? I guess they’re still trying to be Nice & Polite to Republicans.

  • Let’s send this quotation by email to Chris Matthews of Hardball. He is as bad as they come in the campaign trivia department. Last night he devoted yet another segment to Hillary’s hand clapping. Yes, her hand clapping. He’s done it before, too, on that subject.

    Matthews has enough clout with MSNBC that they don’t force him to do celebrity frolics and other forms of trivia the way they do with Olbermann and Tucker, and yet he squanders much of his hour with outrageous crap like this.

    Meanwhile, a medal for Anita Esterday, and the Hall of Fame for “You people are really nuts.” Let’s use that every chance we get against the MSM.

  • Pingback: Why oh Why is our main stream media so horrible? at deschutesdemocrats.org

  • Mmmmm…Maid Rite. I’ll have a Mega Cheese Rite with fries and a vanilla shake.

    Next time, Hillary, let the waitress know what you’re doing about the tip –it’s important to them.

  • Kind of sickening how breathless these reporters were to file a potentially embarrassing story over a tip, and yet, that same breathless desire for a scoop or a headline seems to fizzle when it comes to things like torture memos, and paying $100 million a month to Musharraf in exchange for a pinky-sworn promise that the money would be used to benefit Pakistan – which must be one reason we can’t afford to expand health insurance coverage to more children or repair our infrastructure – tell us again what the difference is between Musharraf and Saddam? Oh, right – Musharraf actually has nuclear weapons.

    But, oh my, all of that is just so complicated and boring – it’s so much more fun to write about haircuts and broad shoulders, and intoxicating man-smell and cackles and cleavage.

    Time to just end the pretense. Draft the teams at Entertainment Tonight and Inside Edition and People magazine and Us Weekly to give us all the fun news and gossip and put the network and cable news and talking heads and major newspapers out to pasture.

  • Several years ago I ate at a restaurant in Tulsa where Frank Keating (candidate for Governor) had recently dined along with his entire entourage. Our waitress told us that the Keating entourage not only had left no tip, but had left the restaurant without paying anything! They stiffed the waitress AND THE RESTAURANT! It didn’t make the news, but it probably should have.

    This little flap will have one good side effect. Tips are going way, way up when candidates dine.

  • Personally, I think that whether or not someone leaves a tip goes to their character. Restaurant servers are usually paid minimum wage (or lower!) with the expectation that tips will help bring it up to something closer to a living wage. And as someone who has struggled economically for most of my adult life, I sympathize with the servers. I heard the story on NPR. I do judge the character of those around me by how they treat people in service industries. I don’t see why someone should be exempt because they’re in politics.

    If we on the left are going to claim the moral high ground on issues such as the vanishing middle class and the ever-growing disparity between rich and poor, we shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss tipping as an issue. Tips are usually a big deal to people who depend on them thelp pay their rent and bills. Yes, the Clinton campaign said they left a tip. Yes, this particular story turned out to be a non-issue. Yes, I wish the media would focus on more substantive political issues. However, I think that we’d be better served by using this story as a springboard into a discussion on minimum wage and poverty economics instead of dismissing it.

  • agreeing with you –

    Mini-scandal: a waitress’s report that Mrs. Clinton had failed to tip after eating at a Maid-Rite diner in central Iowa, an assertion that ricocheted around the Internet on Thursday.

    At last, an issue that can propel Obama and Edwards over Senator Clinton and into the lead – TippingGate.

    But the waitress, Ms Esterday. got it right. “You people are really nuts,” she told a reporter during a phone interview. “There’s kids dying in the war, the price of oil right now — there’s better things in this world to be thinking about than who served Hillary Clinton at Maid-Rite and who got a tip and who didn’t get a tip.”

    homer at http://www.altara.blogspot.com

  • When I heard this on my way into work this morning, stuck in the parking lot known here in KC as Interstate 70, I literally yelled out loud:

    HOW IN THE HOLY FUCKING HELL DOES THIS MATTER?!?!?!

    I then switched it over to Mike & Mike in the Morning for the rest of my commute (a sports show, for those who don’t know).

    NPR has become just another corporate outlet, less interested in real journalism and more interested in practicing stenography lest their access is taken away by those in power.

    They won’t be getting another red cent from me until they turn back into the independent, reliable and accurate outlet they used to be. And they can start by firing that ignorant slut Mora Liason (sp?).

  • Stacy6–
    Um … you do understand that the campaign did, in fact, leave a tip, right? In fact, it was more than 50 percent.

    That’s kind of the point here.

    I’m still trying to understand why this is such a huge issue when other character issues — like, say, Thompson’s laziness, Rudy’s infidelity, Romney’s treatment of his family pets, et al — are never, EVER covered with the same zeal as some perceived slight from a Democrat.

    I. Just. Don’t. Get. It.

  • Luckily for the commercial outlets, the idiots who are dumb enough to fall for the advertisements which actually pay for the whole mess, they hate “hard stories” and they LOVE fluff.

    Thanks Racerx: seems we have at least ONE network reporter/ producer/ anchor/ writer/ desk person/ editor on this thread. Was it a silly piece? Yes. Should they have checked facts? Yes. Does middle America love, love, love this kind of crap story? Absolutely. Until we have bosses who stop threatening to fire us if we don’t get the scoop and/or beat the competition these are the rules. News is a business, let’s not forget. We all have to eat. It DOES appear that this kind of story is picked up faster than oh, say, the likes of Haditha or Abu Ghraib. But who was it that watched a white van drive down the LA freeways for hours? Oh yeah. You guys. Stop tuning it for Anna Nicole and MJ and we’ll stop reporting on it. (by the way, I left network news for foreign news years ago for this very reason).

  • I never to listen to NPR anymore. Too corporate, GOP and shallow. I get much more news, along with many laughs and thoughtful argument, from the Stephanie Miller show and other lights on Seattle’s AM 1090 progressive radio. Between Stephanie and Jon Stewart and Carpetbagger I have more than enough “news” to chew on, and getting it is rather painless. I rarely shout at the radio, the TeeVee or my computer as long as I follow this regimen.

  • Stacy, no one’s dismissing tipping as an issue, but it’s hard to be heard on the overarching issues of trying to make a living in an industry that requires one to be dependent on what amounts to the kindness of strangers when the media sucks all the oxygen out of the room trying to embarrass a candidate. If the media were actually doing its job, it would be reporting more on John Edwards, for example, who is trying very hard to have a conversation about the forgotten people who are part of this economy and who struggle to survive while working very hard.

  • As a daily NPR listener, and one who heard the original interview at 0’dark:30 yesterday monring, I have to take issue with the idea that they “picked up the story,” when it seemed like a simple phone interview in which the waitress made a claim that the reporter should have checked on before airing it. If the NYT then followed up on it without confirming parts of it, they should take responsibility for that. This morning the NPR reporter took a chagrined view of the story. I didn’t at all get the feeling that the NPR reporter saw this as a “scoop” or that he was “breathless” about the reporting. How other news companies covered it has nothing to do with NPR.

    As (I’d like to think) a discerning news listener or viewer, in my opinion, NPR still provides the only neutral news coverage around. I have no doubt that the Bush-lackeys at the top have had little influence on the radio news reporting (as opposed to TV content), and that any NPR reporter* would fight tooth and nail against any push from above to conservative-ize (yes, I know it’s not a word, no emails, please) their stories. It’s about the only American organization left that I have any level of faith in.

    * Juan Williams notwithstanding. He went from NPR to other organizations, and it seems as if he turned to the dark side.

  • Tell ya what, sm… If news is a business rather than a public service, why not just go whole hog and start showing porn? Think of how much mazuma you guys would make by just sticking hidden cameras in a few hotel rooms at places that charge by the hour. The ratings would skyrocket!

    And go easy on that “you” stuff. No, I didn’t watch “a white van drive down LA freeways for hours” and I don’t tune in for Anna Nicole and MJ. In fact, I generally either change the channel or leave the room to make a sandwich when that kind of celebrity fluff comes on.

    Maybe, just maybe, aiming for the lowest common demonimator is a bad idea in the news business. Maybe, just maybe, doing that means you’re no longer involved in “news” but in entertainment.

    Pamela Troy

  • Next time, Hillary, let the waitress know what you’re doing about the tip –it’s important to them.

    This is a canard, simply trying to make this somehow Hillary’s fault. Her campaign left a tip, it was miscommunicated temporarily (not surprising, given how hectic things must have been) and lousy reporters (i.e., most of them these days) made a flap out of nothing.

    In 2004 I helped serve during visits by both the Dean and Kerry campaigns to the restaurant where I then worked in Portland, Oregon. The tips both times were handled as a group tip and divided later among the staff who served the group. That often happens with big, unusual groups, (and most restaurants add a gratuity for large groups to the bill). With the Kerry campaign, the tip ended up being almost 30%, but I didn’t know that until the next time I came in to work, two days later. Should I have alerted the media?

  • That’s bullshit, bc.

    Do you usually hand a generous tip to the restaurant manager, but you don’t bother to let the server know about it?

    Ok, so it was an oversight. Big deal. But my statement wasn’t a baseless smear –it’s common practice.

  • I’d bet some scenario more or less like this happened:

    Hillary is walking out of the diner. Halfway out the door, she turns to one of her underlings and says, “Oh yeah, give the waitress a tip.” The idiot underling (probably some blueblood who doesn’t know human nature half so well as he/she thinks he/she does) hands a $100 bill to the manager, explains that it’s a tip for all the wait staff, and then the underlings walks away, thinking he/she has pulled off a great move. Then the idiot manager, who maybe wouldn’t risk something like this if it was just anybody who left the tip, but he’s a dick Republican who hates Hillary- or, maybe he’s not political and he would try something like this on his wait staff without the politics- decides to keep the tip and not tell anybody, since none of the waitresses was within earshot, and thinks no one will ever know.

    Then the waitress notices she doesn’t have a tip, complains to her colleagues, and some Republican waitress starts making phone calls, which starts the story. When Hill’s campaign calls the press and calls the restaurant, the manager is like, “Oh yeah! That tip!” and gives it to the wait staff on the pretense that he just forgot, since he doesn’t want to risk pissing them all off on the weight of his word (probably little valued by the staff, since he’s probably a dick all the time) versus Hillary’s. Esterday, who is a liberal, treats the whole thing as a misunderstanding, since she gets the tip, and decides to tell the meida they are nuts for making such a disproportionately big deal out of it.

    This is just an idea of what could have happened to start the misunderatandings. I’m sure some details are different, but I just tried to cook up an explanation that would explain the different details we’ve heard about the story.

  • JKap wrote:

    Do you usually hand a generous tip to the restaurant manager, but you don’t bother to let the server know about it?

    Sometimes you can trust doing that, sometimes you can’t. A lot of people would probably do that when they haven’t even eaten at the place before and don’t know the manager or the wait staff, although I agree it’s not a smart practice. Probably you can do it if you know the manager and the waitresses. But otherwise I’d recommend making the tip goes right on the table you sat at, and even better, right in the waiter/waitresses hand. But leaving it on the table is good enough for me- can’t always wait around for a waitress to come back.

  • I wrote:

    Probably you can do it if you know the manager and the waitresses.

    For the gullible, this means you an trust doing it if you know the manager and the waitresses and he knows you know the waitresses AND you know the manager is not a dick or dishonest. I’m not saying “If you talk to the guy sometimes and if you know each other’s names you can trust him to do what you say with your money,” which of course doesn’t make sense.

  • No, it’s not bullshit. It, in fact, happens a lot. And your comment does try to shift blame onto Hillary’s campaign from where it belongs. Canard it was, and canard it remains. And your aggressive tone makes me wonder. What’s your agenda here?

  • That often happens with big, unusual groups, (and most restaurants add a gratuity for large groups to the bill).

    Yeah, totally. I’ve never worked as a server before but I think I’ve seen people in my family who are more experienced than mre give like a $100 tip to a server and say it’s for all the servers before when we’ve gone out to eat in a big group and been served by several people while we were there.

  • To me, the silliest thing is that somehow one ‘forgotten’ tip (which wasn’t forgotten at all, it turns out) is somehow a ‘smoking gun’ indicative of the character of the candidate. People seem to be automatically assuming that if a tip isn’t left on the table, that it was a deliberate and malicious act on the part of Hillary Clinton personally. People do screw up sometimes, so even if a tip hadn’t been left (which, again, it HAD) you would need to show me at pattern of behavior, not one isolated incident.

    If my girlfriend forgets to say “I love you” before hanging up the phone, I don’t automatically assume that she hates me and is breaking up with me that afternoon. Such attitudes are just plain dumb.

  • Oh dear lord … are we really arguing about gratuity procedures? Really?

    Well, as someone who spent four years waiting tables, I’ll play this game!

    It depends if this was a “pay at the table” or “pay up front” establishment.

    It depends on if the groups was spread across several tables and, thus, several servers.

    It depends on if Maid-Rite is a tip-sharing shop.

    And it depends of if any of this matters one fucking bit when it comes to electing the leader of our country.

    The only one I can answer is that last one.

    And that’d be a “Hell no.”

  • What is the problem with making sure a server gets a tip and knows it? Does everyone think she and her coworkers and the management made so many mistakes that nobody even knew if a tip was left? Really? The follow-up story I heard this morning didn’t clear this up. No $100 charge was on the cc… I was a waitress through graduate school and there was a pattern. It was the people who could afford the most who left the least. And men tipped better than women. And people who were nasty from the moment the entered the building planned on stiffing the staff… and so on. Serving tables is the most subservient work and things like this still chap my butt. They should cover their campaign tracks in a solid fashion.

  • Maybe the manager/counter person just has math anxiety, and can’t figure stuff out without the register doing it for him/her, and they don’t keep a pocket calculator next to the register. That is, maybe they had 7 servers working that shift, he/she couldn’t just figure out, “Well, $70 is $10 each, and $30 is $4 each” (For the bluebloods out there, yes, I really do know that 30 does not divide exactly into 7 and 4, and the multiplication tables they teach in regular, normal people elementary schools do not say that it does. It’s just that most people do not really care that much about change less than a dollar, so you would just “rough” estimate it or ignore the remainder change in a situation like this, unless you’re Rain Man. So calm down). So the person just decided to throw the $100 bill in the cash register and intentionally forgot about it, or threw it in there, procrastinated asking someone else to tell her how much it divides to, and then at the end of the shift or whatever intentionally forgot about it, out of embarrassment. I know it might sound almost impossible, but really, it’s not such a strange thing to happen and a lot stranger things have happened.

  • So when is Malkin going to spring from the dumpster and screams, “she’s working for them, we are not nuts.” Then disappears into the day old lasagna.

    Swan go away, pretty please.
    Don’t you have a blog ??

  • Beans, quit blaming the victim. People make mistakes like the wait staff or the manager made, intentionally or not, all the time. It’s not impossible. The Bush administration, or the contractors it employs to work in Iraq, misplace millions of dollars of money for Iraq all the time.

  • ScottW wrote:

    Swan go away, pretty please.

    Whoa, sorry for making it hard for the Republicans to confuse this shit. Sorry for presenting the realistic scenarios. Go away, pretty please, dick.

  • The waitress blamed nobody in particular and neither do I. This is a small cohesive long-term friends group here who will never forget this visit. And the first thing they probably did once the bill was paid is find out if they won a small lottery. It’s what we did… Additionally, the campaign, if I am not mistaken, used this women as an example… they should cover their campaign tracks. We all know that Democrats are media targets anyway, so this sort of thing just didn’t need to happen.

  • bc,

    Please explain how my comment was a “canard” –a false or baseless, usually derogatory story, report, or rumor.

    Here is my comment that you accused of being a “canard”: Next time, Hillary, let the waitress know what you’re doing about the tip –it’s important to them.

    Exactly what is false, baseless, or derogatory about it? What is your definition of the word “canard”?

    First of all, it is an imperative statement –I’m giving advice to Hillary. Second, it’s not a rumor and it isn’t baseless or misleading –if the waitress had known about the tip, then this whole thing probably could have been avoided. Third, tips are important to servers –just ask one.

    So I was merely suggesting how this misunderstanding could have been avoided and you called it a “canard.” That is baseless smear if you ask me. And that is why I took a harsh tone.

    Is it good reporting? Absolutely not. There are more important things that I would choose to report on about Hillary, for example her Patriot Act vote –but you don’t see much coverage of that in the MSM or here at the Carpetbagger Report.

  • There are a million scenarios we could concoct about what transpired.

    My thought was that (1) they didn’t leave it on the table because the place was a madhouse and they wanted to make sure they left it in the hands of someone who would make sure it got divided among all the servers, (2) in the chaos, the manager set it aside and then forgot about it – he’s even said that if the waitress did not get her share it was probably his fault and (3) even if it was 5 servers on a total bill of $157.00, making sure that each person got a decent tip was a good thing, not a bad one.

    Part of the problem and the reason we are having to suffer these pretty much pointless stories is because the reporters traveling with the campaigns are bored out of their ever-loving minds; it’s probably like living Ground Hog Day ( a movie people either loved or hated – I hated it), so anything that disrupts the endlessly repeating pattern of the day feels like real news. It points up the need to rotate people in and out of campaign coverage, so fresh eyes and minds have a chance to dig into some real issues and focus on the policy that is being discussed at meet-and-greets – if any. The reporters probably need “human interest” a lot more than we do – it may be keeping them sane, but it is making the rest of us crazy.

    I am hard-pressed to imagine that the most disciplined and well-oiled campaign machine out of all the campaigns would screw themselves over a tip, for God’s sake.

  • Ed Stephan (#27) is right about NPR. Their top-of-the-hour reports are embarrassing: either he said/she said, administration or GOP quotes with no counter even when they’re lies, or flashes that make me think I’m living in 1960 Bulgaria and hearing about the deathlessly fascinating factory visits of our Glorious Leader.

  • beans wrote:

    The waitress blamed nobody in particular and neither do I.

    Whoa, getting a little incoherent here, beans. In the previous comment, you wrote:

    What is the problem with making sure a server gets a tip and knows it? Does everyone think she and her coworkers and the management made so many mistakes that nobody even knew if a tip was left? Really? . . . They should cover their campaign tracks in a solid fashion.

    What do you expect the Hill campaign to do, exactly? Record all their encounters with people on digital video cameras and get affidavits from every regular joe they meet of what went on between them before they leave the place? Nice try, jerk.

    * * *

    That math anxiety can be a real pain. I am a real smart guy, from a family where we all got SAT scores, without even taking courses or studying for them, that most kids would die for (I got my 1380 mostly without even paying much attention to anything the high school teachers said to me, except for some English and history classes). I had some math anxiety when I was younger, but it kind of got not-so-bad as I got older. But when I worked at cash registers, I discovered that doing math in your head with a bunch of people waiting on line is a little different than doing it on paper in front of you. Imagine you are handed $20.00 for a $14.36 bill. You can’t do that in your head by imagining a 20.00 over a 14.36 and working it out liks you would on a sheet of paper. You’ll probably get confused. You have to count up: “64 cents would make $15, then 5 more dollars makes 20 bucks- the change is $5:64”- like that. I worked at a register that, because of what kind of a register it was and because of some aspects of the business, we had to turn off or not use for a few transactions from time to time (for example, some stuff that didn’t have a button on the register because you would sort of rent it from us- leave us a deposit and then come back for it when you brought the thing back). When I started working the register, I started completely stalling on simple arithmetic operations that I knew I could do easily on paper, like the example I just gave above, with lines of people 7 or 10 customers long in the store! Other kids from the neighborhood who worked there and who knew my rep for being a super-genius saw me f-ing up like this and probably thought “retart.” That’s embarrassing. After futzing up a few times, one fo the girls who worked there longer than I had explained to me how you figure it out, and that a lot of people have trouble adjusting to it when they don’t have the register to do it for them. It just goes to show, for one thing, how the schools don’t teach you how to count change out for people / do arithmetic in your head, by instead having you draw a picture on a piece of paper over and over again- so the strict “show your work” policy we have hammered into us for years in classes with math can actually make you less comfortable with math, and probably makes people less efficient.

    My example shows how the simple $20 – dollars and change example can be difficult practically even when it’s not in a class, but when people start wanting to give you $21.36 or something for a $14.36 bill, or when they start changing the amount of money they want to give you after they already handed you some money, forget about it. It’s just not easy for a lot of people to do at first without a register.

  • A couple of minor points:

    If you listen to the original radio story (what’s on the NPR website isn’t a transcript), the reporter does say that the waitress’s claim of no tip being left was confirmed by a manager there. (biggerbox suggests the reporter should have talked to other waitresses but he did get confirmation (if perhaps incorrect) from a manager there). The reporter today did say he should have contacted the campaign as part of the original story. The tip wasn’t the main point of the story; it was how ordinary people are pulled into a campaign, and Sen. Clinton did talk about the waitress later on the campaign trail, something the waitress wasn’t particularly happy about.

    Sen. Clinton’s campaign has offered no proof that the tip was paid (aside from someone with the campaign telling the waitress that the tip was paid on the credit card, which the waitress told them in response was not possible); the campaign hasn’t put anyone forward who can say he/she paid the tip, nor has any waitstaff come forward to say they received any tip (the restaurant owner, who wasn’t there, said he thought a tip was left to at least 3 of 6 servers there). People who are insisting that the campaign did pay a tip and is obviously faultless are no more obviously correct than the original story was, and should probably dial down their righteousness a notch or two, at least for the moment. They’ve just decided to believe one side over another when there’s no current public proof one way or the other, other than the evidence that the story is more complicated than it seemed when it was first reported.

    No disagreement that this is all “really nuts” but if this is so unfairly damaging to the Clinton campaign, why can’t they just put out a statement from the person responsible for paying the $100 tip? Seems like that would go a long way toward settling the issue. Just saying they paid a tip (while showing confusion about how it was paid) in the long run just adds “but s/he said” to the story, and doesn’t really help resolve it.

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  • I’m floored by much of this analysis and discussion. I heard the story and the waitress’s comments. She just flat-out stated that she didn’t get a tip. I’ve heard the contradictory explanations from the Clinton campaign. And now I’ve read many of these comments that nauseate me.

    The bottom line is that Hillary and her campaign failed to make sure that the waitress was appropriately tipped. Whenever possible, you make sure that wait staff receive their tips directly – in their hands or on their tables – or you inform them that you have left the tip (it better not be cash!) with the host or cashier or manager. Why do you NOT want to leave cash (as opposed to a documented credit or debit charge) with hosts/cashiers/managers? Because like most restaurant employees, they usually are also lowly paid and struggling and prone to thieving.

    Hillary brought this on herself. She has used the woman’s comments about working two jobs to struggle to make ends meet for campaign stump material. But for me, she and her campaign just don’t really get it. This is akin to George H. W. Bush going shopping for socks to encourage Americans to stimulate the economy by shopping more and then being dumbfounded by cash register scanning technology which he had never seen before. It’s about being in the bubble and staying in the bubble even when she’s among hoi polloi.

    This waitress has gotten hit twice by being stiffed (regardless of who did or did not give her the money). Not only has she lost out on the immediate cold, hard cash, she must “declare” for income tax withholding purposes that she received a minimum tip for those food purchases because the IRS assumes that she does. So she’s being taxed on what she didn’t make.

    The waitress, who comes off as gracious beyond belief, is right in one respect but wrong in another. There are more important issues than her one personal, particular tip. But the personal is political, and the macro is made up of the micro. When a politician demonstrates that he or she doesn’t know how people are struggling to make their money in the everyday world, that politician has no business making economic decisions for us.

    Of course, Hillary could take responsibility and acknowledge that she or her campaign made a mistake. But, oh… that’s right. This is the same woman who won’t acknowledge that her support for Authorization to Use Force in Iraq was wrong.

    (Sigh.) It looks like she’ll be the Dem nominee, and I’ll vote for her over any of the Repubs. But I can’t help thinking that we could do so much better.

  • What nobody’s mentioned yet is the item near the end of the NPR piece where the waitress, who works a second job at a nursing home, mentioned that the owner of the nursing home (not a Hillary fan) cut her hours way back after the waitress’ picture (with Hillary) appeared in the local paper. To me that’s the bigger scandal.

  • I don’t know if this is a Maid-Rite policy everywhere, but employees of the Maid-Rite franchise in Quincy, Ill. (featured on Alton Brown’s Feasting on Asphalt), cannot accept tips.

  • Okay Swan, you big blogger bully man. I’ll clear up the part that leaves you so crazy and angry that you need to call me a jerk. (whaaaa) I do blame somebody in particular on Hillary’s staff, and she hired them, so, well… it’s her fault. I’ve changed my mind. It’s Hillary’s fault.

  • When our media reporters echo the White House line for war with Iraq, without checking a single fact, and not repeat those same stories for Iran, as though Iraq never happened, why shold this kind of reporting surprise us?

  • so we’re all complaining that this ridiculous story gets more coverage than it deserves, but it’s somehow managed to illicit over 50 comments on carpetbagger. hmm, sounds like it’s exactly the kinda story we love to talk about, no? this trash wouldn’t be reported if we didn’t eat it up like flies.

    complaining about it’s useless.

  • Wow.

    This has got to be the most contentious non-troll-infested thread I’ve ever seen here.

    Just … damn.

    I think we need a group hug.

    🙂

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  • This reminds me of Colbert’s appearance at that press dinner with Bush.

    It also reminds me of the “emperor’s new clothes”. Someone, a real person, has to shout out to these horrible pandering fools who pass as “reporters” that we are at war. People are dying.
    People are losing their houses. And the media people have the mentality of slugs rummaging in slime looking for silver coins.

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  • One things for sure, reading the comments was far more entertaining than the actual story.

    Aaargh, resist urge to comment on the actual story because it is hardly a story…unless the restaurant (which sounds more like a cleaning service that can’t spell) does allow tips –what restaurant doesn’t, allowing tips allows them to pay servers less than $3/hr–and the Clinton campaign really didn’t leave a tip. That would be a story, the continuing saga of millionaire jackasses running roughshod over the little people of this country.

    And i don’t get the newspeople saying that its our fault for the crappy quality of their product. We eat what they feed us, be it the Red smear campaigns of Joe McCarthy or the blatant lies leading up to the Iraq war. Kill your TV, its a liar and a thief. As FZ said, “i’m the tool of the government and industry too, for i am destined to rule and regulate you…”

  • when FEMA did their fake interview in San Diego’s wildfire disaster, it was still better than having reporters there asking idiotic questions.

  • The suggestion that “youpeoplearereallynuts” be registered as a domain name has come true. Just pout a dot-com after and visit

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  • I lost respect for NYT a long time ago. I cancelled my weekend subscription last month. It’s great because you have to call them to cancel, so I got a lot off my chest when telling the subscription person why I no longer believe The Times is “the paper of record.”

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  • Just FYI, all you in the service industry out there:

    Ron Paul has a bill going forward that will ELIMINATE TAXES on gratuities (TIPS). No more keeping track of your tips to pay income tax at tax time. Just think of the extra cash at Christmas-time.

    Just one of MANY great ideas put forward by Dr. Ron Paul.

  • I wish I could raise public attention/embarrassment to all the NON-tippers I come across. This whole thing is childish on so many levels. Who was the original whiner about not getting the tip?

  • Remember when journalism was a proud profession, attracting bright, energetic people who wanted to make the world a better place and stand up for the little people against the giants of industry and government? Nah, me either…

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