What counts now for his career is how well his debut album, “Cortes,” sells abroad. In Britain at least, where it’s being released this month, Cortes has the home-court advantage; his mother is British, and the tenor himself spent a few years at a British boarding school. Audiences got a taste of his classical side last autumn when he toured the country with the popular Welsh soprano Katherine Jenkins. Critics have hailed him as a stunning new talent embodying the “spirit of Pavarotti” with a robust range and heartfelt resonance; Einar Bardarson, the managing director of Cortes’s record label, Believer Music Group, thinks Cortes has the goods to become a major crossover star. “We hope he will be one of the pinnacle voices of the early 21st century,” he says. “We are looking at him as someone who has a lengthy career ahead of him.”
Cortes understands how fickle the music business can be. His parents were both students at the Royal Academy of Music; his mother is a concert pianist and in his prime, his father—who founded the Icelandic Opera, the Reykjavik Academy of Singing and the Reykjavik Symphony Orchestra—was considered a world-class tenor in the same league as Pavarotti and Placido Domingo. Cortes’s brother and sister are both professional opera singers, but he insists that his parents never pushed them. “I remember watching television one day and saw someone playing the trumpet and I said ‘I want to learn that’,” he recalls. “I think music was in our blood.”
During his teens, Cortes starred in the popular European television series “Nonni and Manni” and though an acting career appealed to him, his musical hankerings won out. He spent several years studying opera—four of them at his father’s school—before landing the lead in “Phantom.” Though he loved the adrenaline rush of being on stage eight times a week, his true passion was elsewhere. “My heart lies in opera and classical music and I knew that I would not be happy down the line if I did not pursue what I wanted most,” he says. So he walked away from a lucrative career in musical theater and went back to school. At the Royal Academy of Music he studied with his sister—and Jenkins. Since then, he has been touring Europe; last month he tried out for a role with the Polish National Opera. But his dream is to sing at London’s Royal Opera House, partly because his father used to perform there.
As for the album, there are some highs—and lows. His version of “Hunting High and Low”—a nod to his fellow Scandinavian musicians A Ha—veers toward the sentimental. But “Luna,” performed with M People’s Heather Small, is a striking, epic song with broad appeal. In the video Cortes stands with waves crashing around him, staring beguilingly into the camera. And perhaps the biggest crowd-pleaser on the album is “Nella Fantasia,” a glorious number that highlights his crystal-clear vocals and sultry charisma. As legions of international fans are about to find out, opera can be spellbindingly seductive.
title: “Northern Exposure” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-28” author: “Travis Twitt”
His biggest threat was once his unlikeliest: Tsongas. A blunt-spoken, drably earnest social liberal with an economic message calling for no-frills conservatism and industrial rebirth, Tsongas was written off as a regional oddity when he announced his candidacy last year. Even as he settled into a strong second place behind Clinton last month, many analysts assumed he would quickly fade. But at the weekend a Boston Globe poll based on interviews over a threeday period showed him closing in on Clinton. The final day’s numbers, buried in the three-day average, had Tsongas ahead, 31-25, for the first time in a major poll. Tsongas was savoring his upward mobility Saturday. A new campaign office in Portsmouth was jammed with several hundred admirers when he arrived. “We’re moving,” he said. “We are moving!”
Clinton was moving as well, but not in the same direction. Stoked with Sudafed and cough drops to fight the flu, he rasped and wheezed his way through New Hampshire last week. “I wonder if they’ll vote for a dead man,” he said as he stood sweating on the stage of a Concord high school. Clinton was joking, but party insiders were all but administering political last rites. “If I were Bush’s campaign manager, I’d run two ads,” says one Democratic official, “one with George and Barbara and their grandchildren; the other, Bush as a war hero.” Should the Arkansan falter next week, an Anybody But Clinton Campaign is ready to mobilize. The most likely beneficiary: New York Gov. Mario Cuomo, who is getting a push from a write-in campaign. “This is a unique time,” the ever-cryptic Cuomo told NEWSWEEK, declining to declare himself a possible candidate. On Capitol Hill, lawmakers touted House Majority Leader Richard Gephardt’s possible candidacy.
The scrambled front-runner hierarchy also gives one last chance to other campaigns that were about to be left for dead. Aides to Tom Harkin and Bob Kerrey argued that voters may decide that Tsongas is not a salable general election candidate. “They won’t stay with Tsongas,” said Kerrey adviser Mike McCurry. “He’s a way station for voters who are still looking for something else.” The focus for others is now beyond New Hampshire. “The key thing for us is not to win in New Hampshire but to be in the mix, " said Kerrey campaign director Tad Devine. “If we do that, then we can take Tsongas with us elsewhere and croak him.”
Even if Clinton reverses his decline this week, it’s unlikely to blunt the sense among party professionals that he is deeply vulnerable. The reality is they’ve never been comfortable with him. Clinton has courted the Washington establishment for at least a decade. But respect for his intellect is coupled with an uneasiness about an overly familiar “schmoozy attitude,” as one party official put it. Translation: Clinton is too smooth by half to be completely trusted. Allegations that he manipulated the system to avoid the draft as a college student (box, page 22) are not damaging in their particulars - thousands of young men did what they could to stay out of military service. But the charges add strength to the “Slick Willie” persona, diminishing the moral high ground Democrats hoped to have in 1992. Kerrey tried to exploit the opening, evoking Vice President Dan Quayle’s draft slip-slide and asking Clinton to come clean. “Are you telling the American people the truth?” Kerrey asked.
Until the weekend, however, it appeared that Clinton was hanging tough in New Hampshire. Voters seemed to see in him a confident, gutsy candidate who had absorbed a frightful pounding from a less-than-beloved press corps and had kept his poise. After a 20-minute hotel-lobby grilling in Nashua about the draft, he went on to deliver a passionate speech on health care. Clinton isn’t likely to dry up and blow away if the worst should happen next week. He will be banking on a comeback with victories in pre-Super Tuesday states such as Maryland and South Carolina. In Little Rock on Saturday his well-organized campaign held a training session for 100 advance people who will soon fan out around the country. “You know I’m going to show up on Super Tuesday,” he told NEWSWEEK, “no matter what happens in New Hampshire.”
Bush was in fat city compared with Clinton, but it didn’t stop his advisers from feeling their own brand of frontrunner queasiness. While the president’s renomination has never been in doubt, rightwing nemesis Patrick Buchanan has forced the campaign to spend millions of dollars and weeks of effort placating New Hampshire conservatives riled about tax increases and the economy. It was time strategists hoped to spend courting swing voters and softening up the Democrats for the fall. Buchanan is a tempting target for negative ads. The Bush campaign has two ready for use: one mocks Buchanan’s America First isolationism with a wall around a map of the United States. A radio spot features a Desert Storm veteran expressing gratitude that Bush, not Buchanan (who opposed the war), was in charge when he put his life on the line.
But Bush’s handlers are keeping their powder dry-for the moment. One reason is that Buchanan is no longer gaining. A poll released late last week showed Bush leading by better than a 2-1 margin and pulling away, Bush aides also fear a backlash from going negative so early in an election year. “We would look nasty and desperate,” said one top White House official. Buchanan aides say as many as half of the New Hampshire Republicans still remain undecided-enough to give their man about 35 percent of the vote. If he still shows some kick by the weekend, the White House might decide to get tough.
This was not the campaign Bush expected to run. As recently as last summer, the president’s aides were predicting a 1992 cakewalk pegged to Kuwait, crime and quotas-the “KKK strategy.” But that scenario depended on an economic recovery by the end of 1991. Now Bush must sell himself to voters in the new role of credible domestic leader. The early results are not encouraging. The economic program he outlined in his State of the Union Message barely nudged his national approval ratings. His new health-care plan-offering tax credits and deductions to help low-income Americans buy medical insurance-is already a political DOA in Congress. Attempts to reanimate the average-Joe image he evoked in 1988 with pork rinds and country music are falling flat. At a grocers convention in Orlando, Fla., last week, Bush was “amazed” by the brave new world of electronic checkout scanners-a part of American shoppers’ lives for more than a decade.
Bush has been lucky so far. A Los Angeles Times poll last week shows him beating Clinton 51-40 in the fall-more a reflection of Clinton’s trouble than Bush’s strength. That’s fine with the GOP, which would like nothing better than to see a wounded Clinton wobble into the nomination. Should he crash-either in New Hampshire or before summer-Republican strategists fear it could hurl Cuomo into the race with a velocity that will give them little time for a sustained counterattack. For both Bush and Clinton, it’s a specter bound to produce more pangs of front-runner angst.
Did Bill Clinton mislead Arkansas officials to avoid the Vietnam-era draft? The Wall Street Journal reported last week that Clinton attempted to extend a draft deferment in 1969 by agreeing to enlist in the Army ROTC program at the University of Arkansas Law School. But he never joined, enrolling instead at Yale Law School. Clinton says he had a change of heart in the fall of 1969 about the fairness of his deferment and returned to the draft. When the first lottery was held just a few weeks later, he drew a safe 311. Clinton has faced draft questions before. What’s new are allegations from an ex-ROTC commander and former draftboard secretary that he tried to evade his commitments.
The new accusers appear to have shaky memories. Col. Eugene Holmes, who told the Journal that Clinton “was able to manipulate things so he didn’t have to go in,” claimed in other interviews as recently as last fall to remember nothing special about, his dealings with Clinton. Opal Ellis, 84, the former draft-board secretary (and Republican) who said Clinton pressed her for special treatment, has flip-flopped since the Journal story was published. At the weekend, two former members of Clinton’s Hot Springs draft board, both Republicans, told reporters that he got no favors. But Clinton’s explanations shave corners. Two months ago he said he talked directly with Holmes about leaving ROTC. Last week he said a relative intervened. Voters may overlook his efforts to avoid service in an unpopular war, but they could take a dim view of inconsistent accounts about an important moment in his life.
title: “Northern Exposure” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-14” author: “Thomas Meeks”
According to court documents, Allen also told the Feds that, beginning in 2004, he gave bonuses to executives of his oil-services firm, Veco, to reimburse them for donations to federal candidates—a violation of campaign-finance laws. The Center for Responsive Politics reports that Allen and other Veco execs have given more than $363,000 in federal contributions since then, nearly all of it to GOP lawmakers and President Bush. The National Republican Senatorial Committee, which received a total of $75,000 from Veco execs, confirmed to NEWSWEEK it has donated $25,000 it got directly from Allen to a veterans’ charity; Stevens is donating $18,000 from Allen and another convicted co-conspirator to charity but is keeping, for now, more than $50,000 from other Veco contributors. U.S. Rep. Don Young returned $38,000 from Allen that covered the cost of an annual “Pig Roast” fund-raiser, but he isn’t giving back $70,000 in direct donations from Allen and Veco execs. A spokesman for Young declined to explain, saying, “It would be inappropriate to comment on an ongoing investigation.”
