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.

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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.

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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.

What media mean by Olympian glory and what that says about war and politics

Russia picked a fitting time for her little national aggression against Georgia – the Olympics.
What two better examples of nationalism run amok can you name than war and The Games?
When the media do their hype of combat to increase patriotic audiences, we call it “yellow journalism.”
Track and field and swim frenzy by reporters and editors and producers deserves as much scorn.
USA Today started the patriotic frenzy with banner headline worry over the “gold mining” on opening day.
CNN closed The Games two weeks later by fretting the USA merely had a higher overall medal count. China won more gold.
No less a legendary sports writer than Grantland Rice reminded us The Great Scorer will come not to write who won or lost but how we played the game.
Nowadays we are derided if we merely admire the lithe, smooth bodies of dedicated athletes doing their best in the global glare to make their athletic mark, any mark.
Nope. Gotta bring home the gold. Or don’t bother
Dorothy Rabinowitz, the Pulitzer Prize winning columnist in The Wall Street Journal, condemned those of us mesmerized by the Olympics for their own value and not for “the national interest.”
She labeled as “Olympics-babble” the view that humanity has a higher standing than nationalism.
That WSJ scold especially chided actor Morgan Freeman for his warmly human Visa ad. Freeman called on us to root for athletes – not for the flag on their backs but “simply because they are human and we are human and that when they succeed, we succeed.”
Only the prophet Isaiah said it better when he pronounced we will study war no more.
The value of the Olympics is to glorify youth in peace instead of deadly conflict. Sports jingoism by the press cheapens The Games into a way to bide time until a real war comes along.
Armed conflict will come soon enough, as Russia proved. One reason is nationalism in the media.
Would I prefer a lack of patriotism? No. I’d prefer real national pride that doesn’t have to prove itself as Russia felt pushed to do in the Caucasus or as USA Today and CNN and Dorothy Rabinowitz measured for us by medals slung around Americans necks.
Now we’re leaving China for the national conventions in our domestic politics, another free fire zone. Politicians and some members of the press in that arena play on our patriotic fear at election time.
Unworthy anxiety forms the real basis for nationalism, not healthy self assurance.
Sen. Barack Obama – the Democrats’ great hope – recognizes our cultural weakness in his autobiographical Dreams from My Father: “Nationalism provided that history, an unambiguous morality tale that was easily communicated and easily grasped.”
We don’t have to think when we operate out of national fervor, only feel. We let the animal out of ourselves.
I’d prefer the media call us to live life gloriously, not revel in human failing by an enemy either at war or at The Games.

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.