They can pull media's leg until it falls off

Every bunko artist counts 

on the victim to help make the con.

The hoax as a media phenomenon has been around a long time.

Damn MSNBC for falling for an election campaign scam. But don’t guilt the cable guys into thinking such things have never been done before.
A guy came into a newsroom where I once worked. He had some highly credible story. It relied on every newspaper’s drive to break a big news story.
In other words our own newshound tendency outweighed the actual facts.
Every bunko artist counts on the victim to help make the con.
His tale relied on him and him alone. He nimbly turned aside every attempt to identify someone who could collaborate. But we could trust him, he said, and wasn’t he standing right there in front of us?
He’d even be willing to stay in town — at our expense — until we published the expose. That way we could hold him accountable.
Asking for financial backing of course was his undoing.
All I had to do was Xerox his fake driver license and fax it to “the authorities,” I told him. That convinced our confidence man to skedaddle.
Election facts and myths flew helter-skelter before the Barack Obama election punctuated it all. A blog and false identity were behind a wavelet of deception about Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. She supposedly didn’t know Africa is a continent, according to a claimed leak inside the John McCain presidential camp.
When so much was being said bizarrely and so much being supposed imaginatively about the VP candidate to nowhere, you can palpably feel the drive to go on air without verification.
The New York Times parsed the fraud ever so gingerly a week later. The Times wasn’t so absolutely sure the explanation of the prank wasn’t a deception too. Remember the old Mad Magazine’s spy vs. spy?
If it’s to be believed, two “obscure filmmakers,” the newspaper said, concocted the ruse with a Web site connected to a fictitious think tank.
The tricksters earlier had gulled The New Republic and The Los Angeles Times.
In another exercise in sophomore humor, someone printed a spoof of The New York Times announcing the end of the war in Iraq.
Ask it. You’re already thinking it: Is truth no longer sacred?
Never was. Never will be. That’s the answer to that.
The ruse we have with us always.
The age of the blog, of the hack, of the wannabe triply guarantee it.
Sometimes it’s for laughs. Sometimes it’s for ego. Sometimes it’s for money.
The continental Palin sting was supposed to help pitch a television script concept.
But I suspect there’s something in the head of some people who’d find an excuse to put one over on media types anyway.
We’re asking for it all the time. Because we value an exclusive break on a big story more than we do waiting for the driver i.d. on the swindler to show up bogus.
The only antidote to the practical joke is fact checking every item broadcast, published and digitalized.
Do I think the media will adopt the absolute cure absolutely?
Nope. That you can bank on.

The incurious rush to save mortgages

Journalism grows slack when it fails to ask questions. . .Its curiosity is like sex – use it or lose it.

What’s the point of journalism, if not to ask questions?
The Media delved into Gov. Sarah Palin’s Alaskan past. Her Republican presidential running mate complained about the background check. And that political tactic now seems stronger than journalistic curiosity.
The reportage wanes as the Palin phenomenon waxes stronger.
Reporters also seem to have used up their quota of inquiry on politics just when we need answers about economic issues..
They need to ask if Americans really want Uncle Sam as a landlord.
The case for Treasury takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac sure seems compelling.
The Federal National Mortgage Association and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation are a mess. Heads had to roll along with any other cliché that would clean up the government-sponsored secondary home mortgage market.
We don’t yet know for sure if the debacle in the total pubic and private securitized loan market will bring down the American economy.
So the government had to reform the two federally backed agencies that own half the mortgages in the nation.
But insuring the market is different from owning it.
We have just socialized mortgages in this country.
And the Press is asking fewer questions than about The Bridge to Nowhere that connects falsehood with Gov. Palin’s claim to reform public works.
For decades we’ve resisted socialized medicine.
Even now Sen. John McCain, the GOP presidential candidate, campaigns against letting a federal bureaucrat stand between my doctor and me.
So why would I want a government clerk overseeing where I lay me down to sleep?
That’s neither a conservative nor a liberal question. It’s something sensible for The Press to ask as surrogate for ordinary, everyday folk.
Yes. Something had to be done about Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac. And quick.
The swift and sure government action, however, has the look of forever about it.
Why isn’t there a sunset provision built into the takeover? Then the government could fix the problem and get out of the mortgage business, returning it to private or quasi-private enterprise.
But the business pages and Wall Street programs on TV aren’t asking that question.
Journalism grows slack when it fails to ask questions.
Its curiosity is like sex – use it or lose it.

There's a simple way to shape political coverage on Oval Office qualifications

Reporting on and analyzing the skill sets of the two presidential candidates and the two vice-presidential candidates wouldn’t be that hard. First, we’d need journalism to work as smart as politics.

The President ought to be as smart as the cabinet.
Now that’s a proposition The Press could use to focus election year coverage.
No more teen mother angst or fighter pilot claim to superiority or community organizing theory or Delaware do-righteousness.
The person who appoints the heads of our governmental departments should be on a par with them.
Besides selecting the best and the brightest, the Chief Executive then has to monitor and manage and motivate them.
Oh, the President doesn’t have to out-lawyer the Attorney General. But a feel for the Constitution and the rule of law would be nice.
Contrary to GOP candidate John McCain’s emphasis, there’s more to the presidency that serving as commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces.
So it’s not necessary to hold a driver’s license for an aircraft carrier or a permit to carry a howitzer or a flight plan for a stealth bomber.
Sufficient unto the day is the sure and certain knowledge that it’s the duty of every soldier to kill the enemy. The how can be left up to the Secretary of Defense.
What the president needs is the judgment to know when to unleash those dogs of war.
And it’s pretty important to have the analytical ability to maintain our tradition of civilian control of the military.
The Secretary of Agriculture may know a lot about crops and markets. But to carry on a conversation about farmers, the President needs to grasp the nuances. For instance we don’t have food stamps merely to feed the poor. The program is foremost an Ag subsidy program.
The Treasury is not a place we keep money. It’s the control room for keeping the dollar sound despite our debtor nation status.
Interior is not about raping the land but extracting its resources soundly.
Education isn’t about enforcing ideology but planting our seed corn for the smart nation we must be to compete in the world.
Commerce isn’t all census and weights and measures – not when we’re killing off our fisheries and can’t get trade policy to work right.
Labor is about fair pay for fair work instead of this seesaw between the rights of unions vs. the prerogatives of corporations.
And what does the President need to know about the State Department to monitor that Secretary?
This: State is the sum of all the other Departments, because we make our way in the world by projecting our good name with justice, intelligence, respect for full bellies and sound minds, caution against bullies and confidence in a Yankee sensibility about trade and money.
Barack Obama has a good idea about appointing a technology chief for the government. There’s a better claim for making that a Cabinet job compared with Veteran Affairs, which could be folded into the Pentagon.
How alienating toward the future and futurists – every person on the Internet – when McCain patronizingly said he doesn't do computers. His implication was we who appreciate the digital world are eccentric.
Technology actually is a way of making science work for us…of causing the future to happen now…of compensating America in the global prosperity race where others enjoy advantages over us.
That sort of thinking and a keenly organized mind would make the President an equal with any Cabinet.
Reporting on and analyzing the skill sets of the two presidential candidates and the two vice-presidential candidates wouldn’t be that hard.
First, we’d need journalism to work as smart as politics.
It’s always intelligent to elevate the national conversation and to focus.

Wasn't it Ronald Reagan who so famously said, 'There you go again'?

You can tell when Republicans enter campaign mode.
They make war on The Media.
And they polarize the nation.
The national conversation ought to be about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan…about the economy, including our oil dependency…and about making us all reverse our feeling the country is headed in the wrong direction.
The rapid response solution is to move assets from Iraq to Afghanistan…stimulate markets for alternative energy…and elect a peace and prosperity government.
But this is a democracy. So let’s talk.
It’s just that it’s hard to talk sensibly when Republicans get on their high horse.
I’d like to be bipartisan with this criticism. But the Karl Rove playbook does put the GOP in a class of its own.
So the national chitchat turned to one teen’s pregnancy, a governor’s tabloid family story and whether it’s okay to talk about an official of either gender taking the kids to High Office.
Simple questions from The Press on behalf of The Voter to understand better Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska brought down the wrath of the RNC.
Turns out the running mate choice by Sen. John McCain is perfectly capable of fighting for herself.
Her line about lipstick as the only difference between a pit-bull and a hockey mom will go down in the books.
But look what’s not among the serious talking points – our two wars, our greasy economy and the national confidence. Gov. Palin’s personal chutzpa isn’t enough to carry the needed political conversation.
And why did the minions of presidential nominee McCain get bellicose with the Press as a shield against a perfectly natural curiosity about his unusual choice of Gov. Palin?
Because the tactic works.
Network anchors and some other natterers were making nice, singing praises, backing off – after her acceptance speech.
So here we go again, polarized and under threat of a McCain permanent media war instead of doing journalism.

* * *

Any City Hall reporter knows a country club lunch and golf game with the mayor compromises credibility.

Network anchors celebrated a pleasurable birthday over French cuisine in a Manhattan restaurant with John McCain some time back and generally enjoyed the Media Elites' cozy relationship with the senator who would be president.

Jim Rutenberg captured the coziness when he reported in the NYT how dismayed the journalists were by McCain's media attack at the Republicans' convention.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/04/us/politics/04media.html?ex=1378267200&en=96c863317b4350bb&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

So it was dismaying to to the rest of us to hear Tom Brokaw – NBC-TV's senior pontificator – lavish praise on the presidential nominee's performance moments after McCain's acceptance speech.

Club and tee time can't be far off.

* * *

The Times is getting the political story right.

And sometimes a chart tells it all. One on the front page the day after the GOP convention compared the number of times certain terms were used per 25,000 words there and in the Democratic convention.

Democrats uttered "change" 89 times compared to 33 for Republicans; they said "economy" 32 times vs. the GOP 14; "taxes" was heard 26 times in Denver compared with 46 times in St. Paul; and "reform tripped off Democratic tongues 6 times as opposed to 25 times from Republican mouths.

* * *

Sen. McCain vows to end "partisan rancor."

Well, maybe not.

He wants to reach the moderates that way.

Yet the hard core of his own party lives for Karl Rovian invective.

The running mate being called "Sarah Barricuda" and Rush Limbaugh will do a lot of standing in and mouthing off for the candidate.

But he's inevitably going to have to energize his base on his own.

Post-election, should McCain win, we'll have greater political division and soreness between his White House and an increasingly Democratic Congress.

End rancor? That's a campaign promise for The Press to monitor.

They serve popcorn in the movies. . .So, what would they serve in the Oval Office?

The movie Juno delights across generational lines: A family copes humorously but seriously when an unwed teen goes through with pregnancy.
Hollywood follows. It doesn’t lead. The film reflects changing social attitudes.
Now life imitates art, imitating life.
The daughter of the Republican pick for vice president is 17 and preggers. She plans to marry the young father but hasn’t yet.
Media and politics alike can leave that script alone.
Fairer game is the selection process Sen. John McCain uses for big decisions such as choosing his running mate – Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the teenager’s mom.
The governor enjoys an ultra short but messy resume with the pending investigation of an official firing wrapped around a lurid family problem, her sister’s divorce.
The more limited question is how well the would-be President McCain researched Gov. Palin’s background: Did he simply fall for a fellow political contrarian?
The larger issue is how the man makes all his decisions: Would he be such a dice-thrower in the Oval office?
His autobiography is the self-portrait of a devil-may-care jetfighter pilot, flying on the edge and taking chances without too much attention to rules.
The most dramatic moment of his long, legendary life struck like a surface-to-air missile over Hanoi – literally. His radar and his training both said, “Get outta there,” when a North Vietnam rocket locked onto his aircraft.
McCain gambled he could still drop his payload. He lost, spending the next five years in tortuous captivity.
The story bears a sacred stamp. No one can criticize the split-second decision nor the sacrifice made for flag and country.
But in the longer view of the man, what recurs again and again as a maverick, counter-to-convention thought process does merit scrutiny by The Media as the designated stand-in for The Voter.
Sen. McCain and Gov. Palin live the lives of a Hollywood script.
Now The Press must help us decide if we want to elect a credible president and vice president. Or do we want to spend the next four years inside someone else’s movie.

The winds of GOP politics

I'D HATE TO BE London, matching Beijing’s show at the Olympics.
I’d hate to be the Republican National Convention, matching the DNC in Denver.
I’d hate to be John McCain, matching Barack Obama’s acceptance speech. That’s like swimming against Michael Phelps.
* * *
THEN THERE'S the George Bush problem. Let us count all the ways and degrees of dislike between the President and Sen. McCain who will be the RNC nominee to succeed him.
Yet somehow they have to share the convention in Minneapolis-St. Paul.
When you read Peter Baker’s NYT Magazine piece “His Final Days,” you feel like McCain should stay in one of the Twin Cities and Bush in the other. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/31/magazine/31bush-t.html?ex=1377835200&en=5c7509e2226dd6cc&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink
(It’s curious: The online New York Times changes the headline to “The Final Days,” as though a fastidious copy editor thought better of hinting at the president’s physical mortality and not merely his political demise. That’s a squeamish sensitivity, if so).
McCain doesn’t like wearing the failed Bush presidency around his neck while campaigning against Obama. Bush worries the senator will lose anyway, failing to validate his two terms in office for history.
Baker, who is writing a book on the Bush years, says McCain wonders if the president, who defeated him cruelly in South Carolina for nomination eight years ago, will beat him again due to that legacy.
* * *
BUT WAIT! HERE comes Gustaf.
He’s a terrifying hurricane, landing in a terrorized Gulf Region still crippled by Katrina and the recovery, one of President Bush’s notable failures.
So Bush will stay at his post and perhaps miss the convention where he was expected to make an opening night speech.
Let us not be cynical and say it’s a convenient way for the McCain convention to avoid the Bush problem. And for Bush to avoid his McCain problem.
Willing suspension of disbelief in politics – as in theater – lets us think the president really is needed at the head of relief efforts.
Never mind this is no detail president, that he merely signs disaster declarations with near ceremonial routine and that national concerns never got in the way of his Texas vacations.
* * *
FOR THAT MATTER the whole Republican conclave may be truncated or rewritten around Gustav. Can’t appear to be throwing a party when people are climbing out of the rubble.
A shorty convention might even spare Sen. McCain the comparison between the GOP production and the Beijing style production values of the Democrats.
Chief among the items of disequilibrium will be his choice of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as vice-presidential candidate vs. Sen. Obama’s widely hailed selection of Sen. Joe Biden.
If you squint real hard at the governor, you can see her maybe as a possible nominee for Secretary of the Interior. She has natural resources, Native Americans and national parks in her state although only two years in office.
Biden endured the full scrutiny of his own presidential candidacy and a national and foreign policy experience larger than Gov. Palin’s largest state in the Union.
Still, she seemed to be getting a pass from commentators on the first NBC Meet the Press after McCain named her as running mate. The exception was not strictly speaking a journalist but the historian Doris Kearns Goodwin.
(That show sure does miss its late moderator, Tim Russert).
Ms. Goodwin sees the dice throw as dangerous for the ticket, since we look at McCain’s age and wonder if he has picked a successor in office we would pick to be our president.
The media might well ask on behalf of us all if we want a president who shoots craps in the first place.
But the roundtable graciousness on Meet the Press suggests the Republicans may be treated to a journalistic easy ride. Toughness, move over for equanimity.
* * *
SO MAYBE THE Gustaf interlude will cover sins of omission by the Press too.
CNN anchor Anderson Cooper announced he would choose the Gulf over the Twin Cities, when the hurricane hits the region so close to its third anniversary after Katrina.
If an entourage of the Press deserts St. Paul for Gustafland, political reporters will get a similar pass the GOP will enjoy for a scaled down convention.
They won’t have to display the same scrutiny of Gov. Palin as the near hostility shown for instance to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton until she acquitted herself so well at the Democrat’s convention.
And they won’t have to display the same skepticism of Sen. McCain they used for Sen. Obama until he gave a soaring acceptance speech watched by more people than watched the opening of the The Games in Beijing.
The Londontown of politics may get a windbreak for everyone concerned.

Our convention-al media

PEOPLE ALWAYS ASK the editor how many work in the newsroom.
Oh, about half, goes the old joke.
The Columbia Journalism Review’s Justin Peters wrote a cute send-up on the 15,000 reporters at the Democratic National Convention.
Most are wearing bad suits.
A thousand are drunk, which Peters says is as it should be.
Many don’t have credentials, can’t find the credentialing office, are complaining about lack of floor passes and are smugly criticizing others in the media who have no business crowding the place up.
Those are right.
But an exception not mentioned in CJR is Asa Eslocker with his ABC-TV camera crew. Denver police arrested Asa – roughly, it sounded like – and used language not too delicate for the reporter’s ears but not likely to be heard from the DNC podium.
Cops said the network crew was blocking a hotel’s private sidewalk.
ABC said the journalists were looking into corporate lobbyists and wealthy fat cats at the convention.
Oh, what a lovely reason to get busted. Waytago, Asa.

- - -

MANY OF THE convention-going journalists are doing it for funsies, no doubt.
Bloggers had an extraordinary welcome.
But professional news organizations can spend $50,000 a reporter and up covering presidential campaigns. Convention town hotels and bars and restaurants and whatever else can be hidden on expense vouchers eat up a bunch.
So why do it, asks U.S. News & World Report.
Its Whispers column quotes Mark Potts, a media blogger at RecoveringJournalist.com, suggesting the media instead do community journalism – my phrase, not his.
Let Associated Press and the big syndicated news operations blow their dough, says Potts. And spend the money instead on covering city hall or local schools and the like.
Well, I’d spend the money on the presidential campaigns. But I suggest the “community” approach, because that implies relationship journalism.
Make the candidates’ health care platforms a local story. Explain what the two hot wars are doing to the home front. Tell the local economy story in Obama and McCain terms the hometown crowd can feel.
All we need to know about the conventions – except for the odd story an Asa Eslocker might get arrested for – can be seen on the television tube as it happens.
Relating politics to the local media audience — priceless, as the commercial says.

- - -

MARK SALTER wrote books with his and boss’s John McCain’s name on them.
Now he’s writing the senator’s acceptance speech for the Republican presidential nomination.
His muse is Peggy Noonan, the hit speechwriter of the George H. W. Bush presidential years, according to Newsweek.
The McCain candidacy is derivative. It’s based on the ongoing war in Iraq, the tax policies of the current president Bush and the trickle down economy from as far back as Ronald Reagan’s days but as dried up for Americans as Death Valley
Two of Salter’s books with McCain – Hard Call and Faith of My Fathers – are workmanlike, readable prose. But they are not dream-inspired like the two published works of Sen. Barack Obama, the Democratic opponent.
The Republican writing team will need more than the Noonan mojo and the campaign leftovers of past Republican years.

- - -

THIS IS A credentialing society.
We don’t seek education for its own sake. We earn degrees and diplomas to get our ticket punched for entering the middle class mainstream.
The odd result is bored, tired, ennui toward life instead of the genuine liberal arts and sciences joy of discovery about the universe and all that’s in it.
It’s the same with journalists who seek the political convention credential and then sit on it.
They have a nasty habit of reporting in the “here we go again” fashion slouch.
But the unfolding DNC show in Denver – and with any luck the RNC convention to follow – don’t live down to the conventional view of blah-boring.
The aroma of American renewal is in the air.
And any journalist who can’t smell those roses had just as well join the drunks spotted by the CJR observer at the convention.

Who's in control of the political story?

Media are so embarrassingly easy to manipulate.
Barrack Obama did it just by saying he would announce his veep pick by text message.
He immediately set up anticipation – the key ingredient in sex and politics.
The chase ensued.
An somewhat important announcement took on even greater weight, simply because reporters fell for the old “hard to get” act.
When some outlets – notably CNN – ferreted out the name of Joe Biden in the first hours of Sunday morning, the rooster crowing sounded like sexual conquest.
Why should Sen. Obama care? His campaign collected all those text message addresses and got a little hype over the VP process as a bonus.
Sen. John McCain lost his title of maverick when he got plain old grumpy instead of being the fun old curmudgeon. But his campaign can still draw media attention away from the opposition just by having something cute to say.
So the new Obama press kit tool, according to media columnist David Carr in The New York Times, is to go over the heads of reporters. The Web gives the Democratic campaign direct access, filtering out the press.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/25/business/media/25carr.html?ex=1377316800&en=6c2039e448c46775&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink
There’s an easy remedy: Reporters could start reporting the substance of the electorate’s concerns. That would be jobs, inflation, world peace – you know, everything that gets passed over while political types dance around the fringes of campaign process, rumor and twitter.
Then Obama and McCain both would have to meet the press on the media’s home field advantage.
The press would reclaim its truer role in politics.
And the public wouldn’t see the media at their most embarrassing.

Do read John McCain and Barack Obama for citizenship, for journalism, for uplift

Hard Call, The Art of Great Decisions
By John McCain with Mark Salter
Twelve, 2007, 457 pp., $15.99

Faith of My Fathers
By John McCain with Mark Salter
HarperCollins, 1999, 349 pp., $14.95

Dreams from My Father, A Story of Race and Inheritance
By Barack Obama
Three Rivers Press, 2004, 457 pp., $14.95

The Audacity of Hope, Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream
By Barack Obama
Three Rivers Press, 2006, 375 pp., $14.95

Every citizen-journalist has a duty to add our presidential candidates to his or her knowledge base.
I feel hopeful. We’ll preserve values, if we elect either man. Read their stories. You’ll agree.
Notice I didn’t say John McCain and Barack Obama share world views. The Democratic National Convention will nominate Sen. Obama this week for his principles. Then Republicans will see that bet and raise it with Sen. McCain’s ideals.
We’ll have a choice, a real choice, not the usual poker game. Their writings make it so clear.
Obama is the change candidate because his journey is founded on family generations where the future – only the future – always looks brighter. So his Dreams has substance. Dreams must, because life depends upon them. He really can understand this current national crossroads of economy and opportunity and progress after race and after class and after mean political conflict.
The Democrat is what he says, the child of always striving, sometimes failing, constant hopefulness.
The Republican is true to his forefathers too. They are Celtic warriors in every American conflict since Scottish immigration. McCain looks backward to their history for his strength.
We must ask if the warrior can govern. Hard Call does not make him out the decision maker you would expect.
The classy Barron’s columnist Alan Abelson flatly calls McCain’s campaign inept. The New York Times details his habit of adopting the last opinion he hears, of agreeing to staff decisions only to abandon them without warning and of undercutting his own spokeswoman in public.
Imagine such executive disorder in the White House and shutter.
McCain admits he’s hard pressed to explain his method. Call actually is an anthology of Horatio Alger heroes – of interest but not as forecast of a presidency.
The ghostwritten selection runs to the conventional white male usually with military or even a naval connection. The senator can’t escape the ghosts of his admiral father and grandfather and his own hellish Navy aviator life as a POW torture victim in North Vietnam.
McCain claims to live for the present. But two pages later in Faith he concedes, “My public profile is inextricably linked to my POW experiences.”
So is yearning for principled death, for projection of military power abroad, for a VFW worldview.
We have this soldier of Sparta, the Greek citystate forever associated with perpetual war footing. We have the philosophical Barack Obama, suited for Socratic dialogue.
Both suffer from absentee fathers. Both lead aimless youths. Both recover well. Both taste betrayal.
Sen. McCain fights an inept government’s misguided war. But he can’t learn from it, perpetually choosing combat as Option One, the old warrior genes kicking in.
Sen. Obama’s DNA points him forward in Hope. His Chicago pastor who suggests the concept turns on him. Eyes on the prize: The Democrat keeps, “…the audacity to believe despite all the evidence to the contrary that we could restore a sense of community to a nation torn by conflict…
“It was that pervasive spirit of hope that tied my own family’s story to the larger American story.”
Two families…two storytellers…two candidates for America.

The Hometowners: Obama and McCain

When you’re hot, you’re hot.
And when you’re not, you’re not.
– Jerry Reed

No one wants to repeat Al Gore’s non-election. He lost Tennessee, his home state.
So GOP nominee-to-be John McCain feels the need to campaign a bit more in Arizona, even though he represents it in the U.S. Senate.
Things slip. People who know you best may not view you as presidential timber. And the minority vote prefers the opponent.
That African American, Native American, Latin American and Asian American electorate counts.
Journalists from those groups saw Democratic nominee-to-be Barack Obama up close and personal at Unity, the combined journalism conference for all four minority groups.
They saw him in “Chicago, Chicago, (his) hometown,” which is generously endowed with admirers of the Illinois senator.
Hot item at the conference was the Chicago-based Ebony cover of Obama as “One of the 25 Coolest Brothers of All Time.”
He made the list with music mogul Jay-Z, R&B great Marvin Gaye and “the original heartthrob, Billy Dee,” swooned Chicago Sun-Times columnist Mary Mitchell.
Obama fever soared until an editorial in that paper had to remind readers that campaigns are the news, not just the hometown candidate.
The Project for Excellence in Journalism found the Democrat featured in 78 percent of political stories, according to the paper’s observation. McCain mentions came in at only 51 percent.
An oped piece by Jewel Woods, a “gender analyst” for the Renaissance Male Project, claimed even guys have a crush on Obama. It’s his “white collar masculinity.”
Still another columnist compared the candidate’s foreign policy team with The 300. That would be Sparta’s hero-defenders against Persia in the cult movie featuring Bowflex-product, muscle rippling warriors admired by gamer boys.
What’s the fun of Chicago, if you can’t go over the top?
The attention drove Sen. McCain to mock the press.
But cool as the breeze off Lake Michigan, “Obama sizes up Mideast stage” in a Chicago Tribune headline.
A quote by Trib columnist John Kass called McCain “grumpy.”
Editorial Board member Steve Chapman called the man “confused on Iraq.”
And Trib syndicated writer Jonah Goldberg called his pro-surge strategy on the war a loser as the defining issue of his campaign.
Don’t mess with the hometown candidate in other words.
A couple of days’ look at Chicago papers conjures the Jerry Reed lyric when it comes to Sen. Obama: My luck was so good I could do no wrong.

Stars Fell on Barack Obama

I will go to Korea, Ike said. He campaigned during an unpopular Asian war.
And America elected Dwight David Eisenhower as president.
I will go to Iraq, Barack Obama said, campaigning during the latest unpopular war.
Now the star system in American journalism is burning, burning bright to light up the Democrat’s presidential campaign.
If the candidate doesn’t make a major foreign policy goof, the media celestials will brightly backlight his election profile. They’re going too.
You get the impression of a royal progress by an oriental potentate. Newspaper poobahs and magazine satraps and TV sultanas will climb aboard decorated dromedaries to form the entourage. The U.S. military will assist the Secret Service in Janissary duty.
Headliners from national newspapers and magazines are going.
So are all three network news anchors – Charles Gibson of ABC, Katie Couric of CBS and Brian Williams of NBC. They’ll be doing primetime interviews with the candidate.
Clang the cymbals. Blow the trumpets. Beat the tabla. The cavalcade comes.
Obama couldn’t buy this kind of publicity.
Neither could Republican opponent John McCain. Coverage of his international trips fit into the routine category.
The old hat McCain is getting the “also running” treatment stingingly felt by Hillary Rodham Clinton in her party nomination campaign against Obama.
“He’s the new guy, though,” rationalize media executives to Jim Rutenberg in The New York Times. The reporter documents the ongoing imbalance of TV coverage in favor of Obama. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/17/us/politics/17anchors.html?ex=1374033600&en=00fc706cfaedd8e9&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink
My own political reporting for The Courier-Journal years ago had to measure up – literally – to the standards of the Louisville managing editor, a stickler for fairness and ethics. He used a yardstick to make sure every candidate got exactly the same number of column inches.
The M.E. also said you have to rise above your ethics sometimes. So he would excuse a lack of balanced coverage for news reasons.
Barack Obama traveling to get his foreign policy ticket punched does not excuse blatant unfairness.
Neither does the “new guy” argument after a long “rock star” campaign by the now familiar candidate.
Nor does the Ike analogy. This isn’t history. It’s politics. And the star system.
Media celebrities recognize a fellow luminary when they see one in politics. So they give chase like Magi going to Bethlehem.
Stardom is an addiction constantly to be fed. Journalism egos are not too big but too little, too insecure, too threatened not to conform with the pack. They can’t stand the idea of being left behind when the court travels abroad.
And network newscasts look enviously at ratings by cable outlets for political coverage. So on caravan they will go.
They’ll need a little music.
Here’s my parody on a Mitchell Parish, Frank Perkins lyric familiar to Alabama:

We lived our little drama, we kissed in a field of white.
And stars fell upon Obama last night.
I can’t forget the glamour, your eyes held a tender light.
And stars fell upon Obama last night.

I never planned in my imagination, a situation so heavenly
A fairy land that no one else could enter
And in the center, just you and me, dear
My heart beat like a hammer, my arms wound around you tight
And stars fell upon Obama last night.

Bed sheets, bazookas: New Yorker, the hen

Eustace Tilley blew this one.
If you know that name, you probably “got” the Barack-o-drama cover of The New Yorker.
Satire is a double meaning the reader is in on. Or else it’s a scam.
If the shock of the image allows a viewer to take it seriously, the artistic or literary trick becomes a mere antic, a ruse, a hustle.
The questioned cover shows Mr. and Mrs. Obama as flag burning terrorists in the Oval Office. “Politics of fear,” is the satiric target by cartoonist Barry Blitt.
Trouble is, polls show some Americans believe – wrongly, but believe anyway – the lies connecting Islam, Osama bin Laden and the possible First Couple.
Those of us who don’t believe are nervous that we live in a society where some do harbor or even foster those untruths. So we’re not too keen for the cover either.
We prefer an information campaign.
The New Yorker tried the humor of disinformation and laid an egg.
Hey, Eustace is a buddy of mine, fictional though he is. I delight in seeing the signature dandy on the front of the magazine. He’s the logo. He’s the sophistication. He’s a pretty good clothes horse, often depicted by TNY satirically with props.
Editor David Remnick can sly up the magazine’s symbol, can satirize public figures, can make fun of our social foibles.
Surely he can do a take-off on the Democrat with a funny name and a funny past and a serious chance of becoming president.
Well, yes. If he can answer one question: Does the cover communicate?
Not to Eustace’s standard is the answer.
Remnick knows how hard irony is to wield as a means of conversation. And he must know he goofed. Because he’s trying to explain the joke. That’s proof positive the joke fell as flat as a magazine cover.
It’s as lame as New York Times editor Bill Keller trying to explain the paper meant to say Republican presidential candidate John McCain showed poor judgment about ethics, not that he had an affair necessarily.
Manhattan is an island. Those editors need to swim to shore more often.
For The Times to link sex and a politician was to run a public DNA test on his bed sheets.
For The New Yorker to attack ignorance with sophistication was to bring a pen knife to a bazooka fight.

Sen. Gramm’s Ph.D. economy goof while 'helping out' Sen. McCain proves public, press, politicians need a common language

Let’s drop the word “economics” in favor of “quality of life.”
Public, politicians and media might get it right then.
Sen. John McCain’s Republican quest to be president is but the latest to foul up. He did it through a stand-in, former Sen. Phil Gramm.
We’re but a “nation of whiners,” said that Ph.D. in economics. Gramm claimed we’re only in a “mental recession.”
Insert funny comment here: Maybe it’s the professor who has the receding mind…he taught at Texas A&M, so maybe this is an aggie joke gone bad…or as Barack Obama, leader of the Democratic presidential camp commented, “America already has one Dr. Phil.”
We don’t need a shrink to know we can’t buy or sell houses, afford fuel and food, meet the hidden tax of rising college tuition, find a job in some cases or get a raise in others.
John McCain still thinks trickle down works, corporations will save us out of the goodness of their hearts and oil policy means greasing the palms of petro execs yet again.
He’s a goose egg on money matters. So he uses Gramm to tell him what to think. But no one told Gramm how to speak.
To be fair we lack a common language about finances. An egghead looks at the numbers, the institutions, the science of capitalism and sees the engine running right along.
The people see only the result and feel the engine running them down.
Reporters don’t translate between the two opposites, which is why God invented journalism – so media would communicate.
When the Gramm-McCain gaffe broke, that’s all the story was. Media treated it as yet another misstep in the political pasture full of language cow patties.
In journalism we call this a daily process story, because it lacks context.
An enterprising reporter covering Gramm-McCain could have, might have, should have included news of the whole day: \

• The federal government is stepping up to support the two mortgage holders that account for half the nation’s mortgages, which add up to $12 trillion.
• Banks are in the tank.
• Gas isn’t, because of costs, which won’t quit with President Bush drawing a military bead on Iran.
• Food expense is tied to fuel.
• Goalposts for retirement keep moving because of all of above.

We’re not whining, Dr. Gramm. We’re living life and enjoying it less. We’re also reading the papers.
We’re just not reading the right story. It would put two and two together, linking screwy political views, the public’s disconnect from brainy economists and daily living.
No more petty political items. No more campaign gotchas. No more disconnects.
Media need to change the language: It’s not the economy, stupid. It’s the quality of life.
Then we would no longer be a nation joined asunder by so many misunderstandings about the meaning of money.
That’s one thing we all have in common, money, but commonly not enough.