If you are interested in press coverage of the campaign,

Today's NYT is full of interesting stuff. Jacques Steinberg has a wistful obituary for an institution of press coverage, the busload of print reporters that daily newspapers used to be able to afford to send along. His sentiment--that something real is lost when you have only two dozen rather than four dozen reporters doing differing takes on a candidate--is immediately undercut by the NYT's own campaign trail reports du jour, especially an execrable piece of stenography by Patrick Healy. Reporting like this can truly be done by a blogger in her kitchen.

But my favorite piece is Neal Gabler's op-ed on John McCain. It not only gives the direct lie to Steinberg's nostalgia, pointing out how McCain's campaign bus produces the kinds of distortion that reporters are supposed to dispel; it also offers the best available explanation for the romance of McCain the straight talker. I mean, the facts by now are quite clear. McCain will do ANYTHING to become president--embrace any position, pander to any constituency, talk out of any side of his mouth, abandon any conviction, coddle any ally--and he is also the most bellicose, the most opportunistic, and arguably the most corrupt of the surviving candidates. He is ruthlessly coy. He lost his chance to really make history when he jilted John Kerry, but believes that he can join the ranks of post-Presidents like Rutherford B. Hayes or Herbert Hoover for a term (does anyone think he could be re-elected?) and ride the country all the way down. Not that he doesn't have virtues as a politician. He's not a total ideologue. He seems to be able to play well with others. He has a sense of humor.

Gabler makes the believable argument that it's McCain's ironic detachment from the political game that makes him so beloved of the press. Of course mainstream reporters are all ironists--mainstream POLITICAL reporters, that is. SPORTS reporters are different, as I'm fond of pointing out. They're objective and critical, but they're fans of the game and fans of their teams. Political reporters despise politics. And so the appeal of McCain, who also openly despised George Bush, for instance, but supported him anyway. The irony of irony is that there's no way out of it. No matter how many lunatics McCain coddles, the wink and the nudge will absolve him. All of us ironists know what it takes to become president in this nutty country.

Can you be ironic when there's actual bombing and bloodshed? We'll see. McCain has always been more aggressive than anyone else in the national government regarding the use of the military in foreign policy. Remember, he wanted a hundred thousand or so ground troops in Kosovo. Hey, then THAT could have been our West Bank, instead of Iraq. As a candidate, he can smile that away. When he actually IS commander in chief, will he be able to?

Bloggers are not ironists. Bloggers are in the reality based community, and want to bring their own real values and interests into the political discourse. Bloggers hate McCain.

The Power of the Press

was on clear display in this week's elections. A sharp turn of fortunes for the Obama campaign came upon the heels of a sharper turn in the tenor of political reporting. The most dramatic report involved an advisor to the Obama campaign reassuring a Canadian government official that Obama's criticisms of NAFTA were political posturing. Clinton's campaign jumped on that report. But there's more to the story, according to the Globe and Mail, which reported yesterday that the original story--which appeared on the Canadian television network CTV--was inspired by a remark by Ian Brodie, who is the Karl Rove of Canadian premier Stephen Harper's administration, to reporters taking a break from covering budget talks:

"He said someone from (Hillary) Clinton's campaign is telling the embassy to take it with a grain of salt. . . That someone called us and told us not to worry."

Government officials did not deny the conversation took place.

See, "Clinton's campaign." And sure, why shouldn't someone from Clinton's campaign reassure the Canadians about NAFTA? After all, it's not the Canadians we mean when we say that NAFTA weakens environmental and labor standards. But what does Clinton's willingness to use this incident to denounce Obama as a hypocrite tell us about her character? That she's crossed the threshold necessary to be commander in chief?

But more to the point: Did anyone in the media think to ask her about this when she was denouncing Obama? The logical question would have been something of this nature: "Do you categorically deny that anyone from YOUR campaign reached out to reassure the Canadians?" Or how about this one: "Do you mean that Ohio is losing jobs to Canada because of their (higher) labor protections and environmental standards?"

Instead the press went into stenographer mode. Others have pointed out that what Obama's advisor is reported to have said does not in fact contradict what Obama (and Clinton, for that matter) said in their debate last week. Given the non-story-ness of this story, why didn't the press try to work it a bit?

Perhaps because they were busy navel-gazing over whether they'd been harder on Hillary than Obama. One thing that the past quarter-century has taught us firmly about the national mainstream press is that, because they are liberal, they will go to any length to torture liberals to prove that they are not biased toward liberals. Same applies to Clinton this time around. I don't doubt that the national press dislikes her. So it turns out that she can play her "Get out of jail free" card--at least once--and get a round of creampuff coverage by accusing the national press of bias against her.

Of course, because she's a liberal, it won't work twice.