On Tuesday night, neither CBS nor ABC featured any Democrats during their Republican National Convention coverage. This is in contrast to the the Tuesday of the Democratic National Convention, when the two networks teamed up to feature Mitt Romney, George Will, Matthew Dowd and Dan Bartlett. Data.
Sarah Palin said this at her coming-out campaign event:
Here's what she said when the bridge appropriation was actually before Congress:
It appears her opposition to the bridge welled-up primarily after it became clear that Alaska was going to have to pay for the bridge on its own, and she took great pains at the time to assure her constituents that she wasn't going to slow the federal gravy train that makes Alaska one of our biggest pork barrel welfare states.
Look, this isn't a big deal, all by itself. Politicians fudge like this all the time. But doing it on the first day, when anyone with a lick of experience would understand that a hundred investigative reporters are on airplanes headed for Alaska right now to look at everything that has anything to do with her governance or her life...well, starting out with a little fib just isn't smart.
I'll tell you the truth: I've got a bad feeling about this. Comparisons with Dan Quayle are easy, but my first thought when I heard this was Tom Eagleton, who was George McGovern's running mate for exactly 18 days before the media uncovered juicy personal details McGovern's investigators missed. Sarah Palin seems likable enough, and I enjoy the idea of having a Vice President whose spouse is a professional snowmobile racer. Their family seems really, really sweet.
But this is high-stakes politics, and she's come out of nowhere to secure a nomination backing up a cancer survivor who'd be oldest President ever elected. Despite the vast experience Republicans are touting, she's never been through the kind of scrutiny she's going to go through in the next few weeks. Mass media careers are made chasing down dirt, and you know every reporter in the world understands that knocking a V.P. candidate out of the box can mean the difference between a career of page three bylines in Des Moines and a permanent seat next to David Gergen on CNN's election night panel of experts.
Starting things out with a lie isn't going to buy her any good will.
I hope Team McCain did a good job of vetting Governor Palin. I hope they looked in every corner and asked every uncomfortable question and checked every fact, because right now people with a lot more dirt under their fingernails than any team of campaign lawyers are descending on Palin's little home town, raking for muck. In a couple of weeks, they're going to know every rumor, every grudge, every short tip she left at the diner.
I hope she doesn't end up like Eagleton did. I hope she doesn't end up, as my mother used to say, a grease spot on the highway.
The big media questions at the Democratic Convention will be: Can the party unify behind Barrack Obama? Are the crazed, post-menopausal supporters of Hillary Clinton so embittered that they'll abandon the party and support John McCain?
The answer is obvious to everyone who doesn't have to fill 24 hours of airtime a day: Of course they won't do that.
Seriously: Does anyone really believe that any significant number of Hillary Clinton's supporters are going to vote for John McCain, who's spending his whole campaign reassuring the right that he's going to preserve the existing healthcare system, continue our war-as-a-first-resort foreign policy, and nominate judges that will overturn Roe vs. Wade?
With a hurricane coming aground in Florida, remember: every time you see a live report by some reporter standing out in the storm, they're following in Dan Rather's footsteps.
Rather was the first reporter to brave a hurricane live, on the air. During Hurricane Karla in 1961, Rather took a microphone on a long, long chord out into the storm to shout his impressions of the storm to viewers nationwide. It was a hotdog move that contained precious little actual information and illuminated nothing, but his live-from-the-scene reporting so impressed CBS that it recruited him away from WHOU-TV in Houston to come to New York.
Every reporter out in Hurricane Fay is doing exactly the same thing for exactly the same reason.
A Boston TV reporter speculates on whether Obama is going to choose John Kerry as his running mate.
The National Enquirer says they've got more on John Edwards than they've published, and ominously promises:
If I'm John Edwards, here's what I'm doing this afternoon:
Click here to buy a disguise.
Click here to legally change my name.
Clck here to price real estate in Fiji.
In the upcoming comedy film flop An American Carol, former President Jimmy Carter is played by Fred Travalena.
Here's a picture of Fred with Bowzer from Sha Na Na who will apparently not be playing Walter Mondale:
Mad Men, the excellent AMC show about my dad's entry-level career -- which is to say, advertising in the early 1960s -- is something close to a cultural phenomenon. I hear the most surprising people talking about it, including a highly Republican CEO and his politically plugged-in wife at a wedding reception last weekend. I was surprised because, delightful though he and his wife may be, they're kind of prudes.
But Mad Men is one of those rare shows that is about a lot of different things at the same time, so it resonates for almost everyone. To the CEO it's a nostalgic period piece. To my wife it's a story about women struggling in a man's world. To me, it's a show where at least once every episode you get to see an attractive women in seriously complicated undergarments. I mean, I don't think it's even legal to make undergarments like that anymore, because of the danger that someone might get strangled.
Anyway, the ratings are out for Mad Men's big-excitement season premier and the numbers are huge. Or, at least, they're huge by modern standards: 2.1 million people watched.
Less than 1% of the American public.
And it's a big hit.
A study of the first six weeks of the Presidential campaign shows John McCain got more favorable coverage than Barack Obama.
Good timing, given the discussion currently taking place here.
