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.