Matt Drudge has the banner headline “MURDOCH WARNS NATIONS WILL BE REDEFINED” above a story that begins:

Media baron Rupert Murdoch issued an urgent internal communication late Monday, warning his staff: “We are in the midst of a phase of history in which nations will be redefined and their futures fundamentally altered.”

There’s not much more detail, so I don’t know whether Murdoch is making a value judgment or is simply making a forecast around which to align his business strategy.

It immediately struck me upon reading the headline, however, that Murdoch said something similar last April when he was the recipient of the Atlantic Council’s Distinguished Business Leader Award for 2008. He closed his provocative acceptance speech with these words:

I was born in Australia … I received my university education in Britain … and I have made my home in America. Over a long and I hope productive life, I have learned that shared values are more important than shared borders.

If we continue to define “the West” or “the Alliance” as a strictly geographical concept, the Alliance will continue to erode. But if we define the West as a community of values, institutions, and a willingness to act jointly, we will revive an important bastion of freedom – and make it as pivotal in our own century as it was in the last.

Murdoch’s experience will continue to be atypical in more ways than one.  But he could be the archetype of a more globalized citizenry, at least at the upper levels.

Barack Obama moved to within 200 delegates of securing the Democratic presidential nomination yesterday, scoring a 56-42 blowout in North Carolina while narrowly losing, 49-51, in Indiana. Barring revelations that would make the Wright affair look insignificant in comparison, the race is all over but the shouting.

Obama Wins the Night

AP’s Calvin Woodward:

On the rebound, Barack Obama left Hillary Rodham Clinton with fast-dwindling chances to deny him the Democratic presidential nomination after beating her in North Carolina and falling just short in an Indiana cliffhanger. Obama was on track to climb within 200 delegates of attaining the prize, his campaign finally steadying after missteps fiercely exploited by the never-say-die Clinton. His campaign dropped broad hints it was time for the 270 remaining unaligned party figures known as superdelegates to get off the fence and settle the nomination.

[...]

Clinton vowed to compete tenaciously for West Virginia next week and Kentucky and Oregon after that, and to press “full speed on to the White House.” But she risked running on fumes without an infusion of cash, and made a direct fundraising pitch from the stage in Indianapolis. “I need your help to continue our journey,” she said.

And she pledged anew that she would support the Democratic nominee “no matter what happens,” a vow also made by her competitor.

Polarizing, protracted and often bitter, the contest is hardening divisions in the party, according to exit polls from the two states. A solid majority of each candidate’s supporters said they would not be satisfied if the other candidate wins the nomination. Fully one-third of Clinton’s supporters in Indiana and North Carolina went beyond mere dissatisfaction to say they would vote for Republican John McCain instead of Obama if that’s the choice in the fall.

[...]

In both states, Clinton won six in 10 white votes while Obama got nine in 10 black votes, exit polls indicated. It was a slightly better performance than usual by Clinton among whites, while Obama’s backing from blacks was one of his highest winning percentages yet with that group.

Adam Nagourney of the NYT:

Despite narrowly winning Indiana, while losing North Carolina, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton did not fundamentally improve her chances of securing the Democratic presidential nomination. If anything, Mrs. Clinton’s hopes for overtaking Senator Barack Obama dwindled further on Tuesday night.

For Mr. Obama, the outcome came after a brutal period in which he was on the defensive over the inflammatory comments of his former pastor. That he was able to hold his own under those circumstances should allow him to make a case that he has proved his resilience in the face of questions about race, patriotism and political mettle — the very kinds of issues that the Clinton campaign has suggested would leave him vulnerable in the general election.

Beating Mr. Obama in Indiana, a state he had once been confident of winning, was an achievement for Mrs. Clinton. But it was hardly the kind of strong victory she posted in Pennsylvania and Ohio. And when paired with his comfortable victory in North Carolina — which Mr. Obama pointedly described in his victory speech as “a big state, a swing state” — it hardly seemed enough for Mrs. Clinton to convince so-called uncommitted superdelegates to rally around her candidacy.

While it remains all but impossible for Obama to win enough delegates to secure the nomination before the convention, Clinton has no chance of overtaking him in the delegate count or the (meaningless, mathematically flawed) popular vote. Mike Allen notes that she’s trying to move the target.

The campaign of Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) has begun urging party officials and news organizations to include the disputed Florida and Michigan delegations when figuring the number of delegates needed to win the nomination. That unorthodox approach could put her in striking distance of Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) over the next month.

Harold Ickes, Clinton’s chief delegate strategist, said in a telephone interview that the senator is likely to finish the primary and caucus season on June 3 “substantially less than 100 delegates behind” Obama’s total if those two states are included. “We don’t believe that this party is going to go forward into a presidential race without seating both Florida and Michigan,” Ickes said.

Clinton has thus far been unsuccessful in her attempts to include those states, stripped of their delegates, into the mix. It’s unfathomable that Howard Dean and the Democratic Powers That Be would change their mind at this late stage, in effect handing it to Clinton, barring some monumental scandal hurting Obama.

Indeed, both Tim Russert and Matt Drudge have proclaimed Obama “the nominee.”

The Popular Vote

To the extent that the argument that superdelegates should obey the “will of the voters” as reflected in the popular vote — which pretty much anyone who isn’t a die-hard Clinton supporter agrees is absurd — it looks as though Obama will win that, too. Here’s the latest estimate by the folks at RealClearPolitics:

No matter how you slice it, it’s razor thin. There’s simply no reason for either candidate to think they have some great “mandate” if these numbers mean anything (which, by the way, they don’t). Still, the only way Clinton has a shot at taking the lead is with the inclusion of Florida and Michigan.

Does Hillary Finally Quit?

Several commentators think Clinton may finally have seen the light last night. TNR’s Michael Crowley asks, ” Does Hillary Know It’s Over?” He thought Clinton sounded “dispirited” last night. And Josh Marshall muses,

NBC just reported that Hillary Clinton is holding no public events tomorrow. We’d earlier reported that she’d cancelled her morning show appearances. But that’s not that surprising. There’s not a lot good to talk about. But canceling all public appearances, if that’s what they’re saying, is a different story.

So, obviously, she’s going to pack it in and graciously concede, right?

Not bloody likely. This is a Clinton we’re talking about here. Hillary Clinton, no less. While candidates always say they’re going to keep campaigning until it’s pried from their cold, dead hands right up until the point when they drop out, it’s simply not in this woman’s DNA to concede defeat.

We’ll be hearing murmurs from the Clinton camp for years to come about how this was stolen from her and that, if only Florida and Michigan had counted, it would have been hers. That’s doubly true if Obama loses to John McCain in November.

The Limbaugh Effect

The most bizarre question going around is the degree to which Rush Limbaugh’s “Operation Chaos” influenced this thing. “Not enough,” would seem the obvious answer given that Clinton underperformed the polls in both states.

ABC’s Jake Tapper reports having met one voter who was heeding Limbaugh’s commands and, if he could find one, there must be thousands! millions!

There were anecdotal reports of big turnout in Republican precincts in Indiana – with, presumably, Republican voters asking for Democratic presidential ballots.

Were they Republicans swept up in Clintonmania or Obamamania? Or did they have something more devious on their minds?

Most of the Republicans voting for Clinton or Obama this election season have been voting sincerely for those candidates – or so they told us, at any rate.

Jonathan Chait thinks he’s found a proxy for measuring the “Limbaugh Effect.”

One exit poll question asks Indiana voters who they would support in a Clinton-McCain contest. 17% of them say McCain. Of those voters, 41% say they would vote for McCain over Clinton. In other words, these voters, 7% of the Indiana electorate, voted for Clinton in the primary but have no intention of supporting her in the fall.

Now, this isn’t a precise measure of the “Limbaugh effect” — no doubt there are some Republicans who backed Obama in the primary out of anti-Clinton sentiment, but plan to vote for McCain in November. But it is a good place to start when making a ballpark estimate. And it’s a sizeable number — 7% may wind up being as big as her margin of victory.

HuffPo’s Sam Stein adds more fuel to this fire:

Thirty-six percent of primary voters said that Clinton does not share their values. And yet, among that total, one out of every five (20 percent) nevertheless voted for her in the Indiana election. Moreover, of the 10 percent of Hoosiers who said “neither candidate” shared their values, 75 percent cast their ballots for Clinton.

These are not small numbers. By comparison, of the 33 percent of voters who said Sen. Barack Obama does not share their values, only seven percent cast their ballots in his favor. Basically, more people who don’t relate to Clinton are, for one reason or another, still voting for her. These are not likely to be loyal supporters.

On a broader level, among the 17 percent of primary goers who said they would choose Sen. John McCain over Hillary Clinton in a hypothetical general election match-up, 41 percent of that group came from Clinton’s own camp. In essence, roughly seven percent of Clinton support in Indiana (40 percent of 17 percent) said they would defect to the Republican should she end up the nominee. That would be a difficult punch to stomach in November. In 2004, nearly 1 million Indianans voted for John Kerry. A seven percent defection rate would have meant 70,000 less votes.

Did these Limbaugh people lie to pollsters, too, convincing them that they were likely Democratic voters? Otherwise, we need to account for the fact that fewer Clinton voters showed up at the polls — despite huge turnout — than in the polls.

Prediction Games

In our predictions yesterday morning, Dave, Alex, and I all picked the outcomes correctly. Alex came closest on the margins, picking Clinton to win Indiana by 5 points and Obama to win North Carolina by 10 points. SoloD was even closer, guessing 4 points and 10 points, respectively.

John Zogby, whose polls I dismissed as an outlyer in that post, got it pretty close, it turns out. He had a 14 point gap in NC but, alas, had Obama winning Indiana by 2. He missed that one.

The Needling and the Damage Done

The biggest concern for Democrats — and, indeed, much of the impetus for “Operation Chaos” — was that a prolonged nomination fight would bloody the eventual winner, damaging his chances against McCain in the Fall. The exit polls would seem to provide some evidence that this has happened.

Marc Ambinder worries about a ” Democratic Party crack-up.

Forget the horse race numbers for a moment: if the surveys are accurate, the polarization within the Democratic Party has reached critical levels. Nearly six in ten Obama supporters in Indiana say they would be dissatisfied if Clinton were the nominee — that’s (I believe) the high percentage of Obama supporters who have ever said that.

In both IN and NC, two thirds of Clinton supporters say they’d be dissatisfied if Obama were the nominee — I believe that’s the highest number recorded for that question, too.

The percentage of Clinton voters who say they’d choose McCain over Obama in a general election is approaching 40% in Indiana. Put it another way: in North Carolina, less than HALF of folks who voted today for Hillary Clinton are ready to say today that they’d definitely vote for Obama in a general election.

But this is just a furthering of existing trends, with partisans of each candidate digging in their heels. Remember all those Republicans who said they’d never vote for McCain? Or would vote for Hillary rather than McCain? Where are they now? Sure, some of them will never come home and that’s likely true for some Clinton voters, too. But history tells us that people get over these things and revert to form come election day.

The racial gap, which actually widened last night, is a legitimate concern. Blacks rallied to Obama in even greater numbers than previously and Clinton got slightly higher white support, especially among the “working class” (a term I truly despise, as it implies that those putting in 60 hours a week at high paying jobs don’t work).

Then again, Obama is almost certainly going to get the nomination. Which means the black base isn’t going to be alienated.

The question, then, is whether white Democrats are going to stay home in November — or even vote for McCain — in significant numbers. Why would they do that? Are we to believe that 40-odd percent of Democratic primary voters simply won’t vote for a black man? Or that the seemingly paper thin ideological differences between Clinton and Obama loom so large that her supporters will abandon the party in droves? That just doesn’t make sense.

Race and the Race

Interestingly, Andrew Sullivan — who yesterday was fearful that race would be a big factor in the postmortems — couldn’t be more pleased with the way things turned out.

Here’s what now seems obvious: African-American voters killed the Clinton candidacy. It is a fitting end to the Clintons’ campaign and an almost Shakespearean coda to their career. The Clintons were exposed in their long-running exploitation and reliance on minority votes. No group was more loyal to them than African-Americans; and in the end, like everyone else, African-Americans realized that the Clintons are frauds, disloyal to the core, cynical to their finger-tips, and finally, finally, returned the favor.

[...]

After what the Clintons did in this campaign, and what they’ve revealed about themselves, and their alliance with Fox News and Bill Kristol and Pat Buchanan, this couldn’t be more appropriate.

This will be history’s verdict: in the end, the Clintons were defeated not by Republicans, but by African-American Democrats. How wonderful. How poignant. In the end, the karma gets you. Maybe it had to be this way. But this final coup de grace against these awful, hollow, cynical people is a beautiful, beautiful thing.

It’s a good thing those African-Americans showed up! (Although, for the life of me, I’m not sure what Fox News, Bill Kristol, and Pat Buchanan have to do with anything.)

It’s doubtless true that black voters were decisive, propelling Obama to a huge win in North Carolina and making it close in Indiana. Indeed, there were so many absentee ballots in Gary that they were up late at night counting them.

On the other hand, let’s not forget that Obama got a handful of white votes, too. Like, 40 percent of them in these two states. And that he won numerous primaries and caucuses in states with negligible black populations.

Indeed, if Obama has been somehow transformed by this process into “the black candidate,” he’s doomed. Even presuming that he’ll energize that bloc like no candidate in recent decades, driving out turnout to record levels, we’re still talking about 12 percent of the population and less than that of the eligible voting population. Remember, too, that 90 percent of blacks routinely vote for the Democratic nominee anyway.

Fortunately for his party, though, Obama is far more than the Great Black Hope. He’s energized the youth vote and seems to have turned that phrase into something other than an oxymoron. A goodly number of Republican-leaning moderates have found him appealing. He’s going to be a very formidable candidate in the fall in a country that’s 74 percent white and where the voters will likely be closer to 80 percent white.

Race is going to be a factor in the election, of course, just as it always is. The “race gap” has always been much greater than the vaunted “gender gap.” But the contest will ultimately be decided on issues, personalities, charisma, trust, fear, and the same litany of intellectual and visceral issues that always decides these things.

At 12:20 Eastern yesterday, I got a CNN Breaking News alert that read, in its entirety, “Britain’s Prince Harry has been serving on the front line in Afghanistan, CNN confirms.” I found it mildly interesting, in that his superiors had previously decided the security risk in sending him to Iraq was too high, but didn’t have anything significant to say about the matter and had plenty of other work to do.

The Independent’s Terry Judd, though, adds a twist: “Prince’s cover in Afghanistan blown by Drudge Report.”

An American website, the Drudge Report, broke a news blackout yesterday by revealing that Prince Harry has been serving in Afghanistan for more than two months.

To the fury of the Ministry of Defence and condemnation from the head of the British Army, General Sir Richard Dannatt, the website announced a “world exclusive” and proclaimed: “They’re calling him ‘Harry the Hero!”.

The article brought to an end an agreement with the media that the Prince’s deployment to Helmand be kept quiet in the interests of his safety and that of the soldiers with him.

The decision to send Prince Harry, 23, to Afghanistan under a cloak of secrecy came after the furore that followed the revelation of his proposed deployment to Iraq. Much to the Prince’s frustration, General Dannatt announced in May last year that it would be too risky, fearing the Prince and his comrades in the Household Cavalry would become top priority targets for insurgents.

Immediately, officers decided the only way the third-in-line to the throne could continue to do his duty without creating an additional security risk was to send him secretly, calling on the media to co-operate in a news blackout. By July, editors of key newspapers and broadcasting organisations were sounded out to see if such assistance would be forthcoming. Without dissent, all agreed that it was the only sensible and safe solution. In December, days before Cornet Wales – as the Prince is known in The Blues and Royals – deployed to Helmand, editors met MoD officials and signed an understanding setting out the terms of the news blackout. While not a legally binding document, it was a statement of faith from the British press.

It is thought the source for the Drudge Report article was a story printed last month in an Australian women’s magazine, New Idea. The Drudge Report is most famous for breaking the Monica Lewinsky scandal after Newsweek decided not to publish the story.

At 3.30pm yesterday the MoD received a call, confirming fears that a foreign news organisation would break the silence. A decision was taken to make a formal statement confirming the Prince had been in Afghanistan. “I am very disappointed that foreign websites have decided to run this story without consulting us. This is in stark contrast to the highly responsible attitude that the whole of the UK print and broadcast media, along with a small number of overseas outlets, who have entered into an understanding with us over the coverage of Prince Harry on operations,” General Dannatt said. “The editors took the commendable attitude to restrain their coverage. I would like to thank them for that.”

Presumably, Matt Drudge was not a signatory to said agreement and had no duty to abide by it. And, contrary to what John Aravosis, Logan Murphy, and Keith Olbermann are saying, it’s not as if he was revealing secret troop movements; the existence of British patrols in Helmand province was well known.

Still, one longs for the old days when gentlemen’s agreements like this were honored for their own sake. Indeed, it’s somewhat surprising that the news blackout on this story was as successful as it has been. Allowing Harry to do his duty outside the spotlight and without creating a high profile target for the Taliban is a noble gesture and far outweighs whatever “public right to know” that would have justified breaking the embargo.

That, of course, is over. The decision has naturally been made to cut his tour short.

A formal decision will be announced within the next hour to confirm the 23-year-old officer’s war has come to an end.

Harry is still out on operations in the Helmand desert with his troop of Household Cavalry – where he is considered safe for the time being. But top brass have accepted Taliban fighters will now be doing their all to find him. And Harry has agreed that he will leave the war torn country within the next 72-hours for a flight home to the UK. But the precise extraction plan will be kept a closely guarded secret to protect his safety.

The news comes after Taliban fanatics were feared to be hunting down Harry after he secretly fought in the Afghan badlands for ten weeks.

The young lieutenant killed up to 30 of the enemy on his frontline tour by directing at least THREE air strikes.

One suspects that his services as a forward air controller can be easily replaced. His especial value was the symbolism of having a prince in harm’s way. To some extent, it could be argued, the publicity value is heightened now that the secret’s out of the bag and that’s not entirely a bad thing as NATO is scrambling to support the Afghanistan mission. But one would have preferred that he be permitted to finish his tour as just another lieutenant.

Photo credit: The Guardian/John Stillwell/PA

UPDATE: Alex Massie passes on word that several British bloggers, and even celeb gossip site Popbitch, had knowledge of Harry’s whereabouts and sat on the story despite the sacrifice of traffic (and presumably, ad revenue) that this entailed. Good for them.

Howie Kurtz has an interesting piece on how mainstream media coverage of allegations of sexual misconduct have changed in recent years. It begins:

When Gennifer Flowers held a news conference in 1992 to announce that she had carried on an affair with Bill Clinton, the New York Times devoted one paragraph of a news story to her charges.

“I am ashamed for my profession,” Max Frankel, then the paper’s editor, said afterward. “We don’t want to report on the candidates’ sex lives.”

The contrast with the paper’s coverage of the John McCain-Vicki Iseman story is stark. Kurtz is right, though, that the primary difference is not that Clinton had a (D) after his name and McCain and (R). Rather, the media climate itself has been radically altered:

In a marked change since the Flowers era, the mere fact that a news organization is pursuing a scandal routinely leaks out. Matt Drudge became famous for reporting in 1998 that Newsweek had spiked a story about a special prosecutor investigating President Clinton’s relationship with Monica Lewinsky. It was hardly surprising when Drudge’s gossip site reported in December that Times staffers were pursuing the McCain story. Dissatisfied journalists tend to be talkative.

Rumors of a story — or the reporting of a story by a venue of little repute — is now considered justification for coverage of the story. Indeed, I’ve done that at OTB more than once. While I generally decline to comment on truly salacious rumors unless they’re widely discussed in mainstream sources, interesting rumors on high-traffic venues like the Drudge Report are sometimes difficult to pass up.

And then there’s this:

The hardest thing in journalism is to spend months on a story and then admit you haven’t got the goods. There is, instead, a tendency to dress the thing up with fine writing and larger themes in an effort to demonstrate that it’s not just about sex, when of course that is the only element most readers — and the rest of the media — will focus on.

For the most part, doing that is fine. Coverage of “larger themes” is often valuable. What Keller and company should have done, though, is to delete the sex scandal material altogether from last week’s piece and put it in either the Sunday magazine or inside the paper along with other feature stories. By putting it in the lead spot on page one, they gave the impression that they had hard news when all they had was a reflections piece.

Photo credit: Steve Rhodes

The New York Times today fronts a long exposé on John McCain, which the campaign describes as a “hit-and-run smear campaign,” under the headline “For McCain, Self-Confidence on Ethics Poses Its Own Risk.” The piece alleges that McCain did favors for a female lobbyist nine or more years ago and insinuates that they were romantically involved.

Early in Senator John McCain’s first run for the White House eight years ago, waves of anxiety swept through his small circle of advisers.

A female lobbyist had been turning up with him at fund-raisers, visiting his offices and accompanying him on a client’s corporate jet. Convinced the relationship had become romantic, some of his top advisers intervened to protect the candidate from himself — instructing staff members to block the woman’s access, privately warning her away and repeatedly confronting him, several people involved in the campaign said on the condition of anonymity.

When news organizations reported that Mr. McCain had written letters to government regulators on behalf of the lobbyist’s client, the former campaign associates said, some aides feared for a time that attention would fall on her involvement.

Mr. McCain, 71, and the lobbyist, Vicki Iseman, 40, both say they never had a romantic relationship. But to his advisers, even the appearance of a close bond with a lobbyist whose clients often had business before the Senate committee Mr. McCain led threatened the story of redemption and rectitude that defined his political identity.

It had been just a decade since an official favor for a friend with regulatory problems had nearly ended Mr. McCain’s political career by ensnaring him in the Keating Five scandal. In the years that followed, he reinvented himself as the scourge of special interests, a crusader for stricter ethics and campaign finance rules, a man of honor chastened by a brush with shame.

But the concerns about Mr. McCain’s relationship with Ms. Iseman underscored an enduring paradox of his post-Keating career. Even as he has vowed to hold himself to the highest ethical standards, his confidence in his own integrity has sometimes seemed to blind him to potentially embarrassing conflicts of interest.

Nine years ago, aides were concerned that there might be an appearance of impropriety and sought to distance a candidate running on the need to reform lobbying from a lobbyist. Why is this front page news in the most important paper in the country?

When did the Times start this “investigation”? Clearly, they haven’t finished it since they have nothing here beyond allegation. Yet they’ve given it the most prominent space in the paper. But when did they start? Since all this happened during McCain’s last presidential campaign — which famously had flocks of reporters tagging along on the bus the whole way — didn’t they have some inkling of all this then. For that matter, were they working on the story when they endorsed McCain for the nomination only three weeks ago?

Noam Scheiber suggests that the Times has been sitting on the story for a while and was forced to run this now because a competing New Republic story on the infighting in McCain’s 2000 campaign was about to be published. Josh Marshall, who ironically was working on a piece about how the media never scrutinizes McCain, says the Times was working on this in December and McCain’s folks initiated legal action to stop it. Matt Drudge also had rumors about such a story in late December.

The story takes care to remind us, early and often, of the Keating Five scandal — about which “some people” thought McCain “got off too lightly.” To get quotes from people about McCain being “imprudent.” To get numerous denials that the relationship between McCain and Iseman was anything but professional — without giving any indication as to why one would think otherwise.

Rich Lowry thinks it’s all about the sex: “Let’s be honest: this story is all about the alleged affair, and all the Keating Five and campaign finance reform re-hash is window dressing.” Certainly, that’s the only thing “new” here.

Marshall muses,

At the moment it seems to me that we have a story from the Times that reads like it’s had most of the meat lawyered out of it. And a lot of miscellany and fluff has been packed in where the meat was. Still, if the Times sources are to be believed, the staff thought he was having an affair with Iseman and when confronted about it he in so many words conceded that he was (much of course hangs on ‘behaving inappropriately’ but then, doesn’t it always?) and promised to shape up. And whatever the personal relationship it was a stem wound about a lobbying branch.

I find it very difficult to believe that the Times would have put their chin so far out on this story if they didn’t know a lot more than they felt they could put in the article, at least on the first go. But in a decade of doing this, I’ve learned not to give any benefits of the doubt, even to the most esteemed institutions.

Maybe so. Stay tuned, I guess.

The Times ownership and editorial board is left-of-center and will certainly endorse the Democratic nominee in the fall. But John Hinderaker’s assertion that “The Times is a mouthpiece for the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, nothing more” and that “no sophisticated person takes the Times seriously as a news source” is unfair and untrue. With rather rare exception, they provide fair and honest reporting. This one, though, is simply bizarre. And the juxtaposition with a giant picture of a joyous Barack Obama is surreal.

UPDATE: Patrick Hynes, who handles blogger relations for McCain, reports that Jim Rutenberg has declined interview requests to appear on his show and that he was “left with the impression that the NYT will be doing NO media in defense of its story.” I’d be surprised if they agreed to appear on a radio show hosted by a McCain staffer. But odd indeed if they’re doing no interviews at all.

You can read dozens of blogger reactions to the story at memeorandum. Some of the more prominent and interesting:

• Kevin Drum has some interesting musings about the decision to blog or not blog about these manufactured Scandals of The Day. He terms this one a “kinda-sorta-maybe-John-McCain-had-a-non-affair non-story .”

• Publius (ObWi): “Gotta say, I’m underwhelmed by the NYT’s McCain bombshell.” And a good point: “[C]omplaints about timing seem overblown. If anything, the NYT leaked it at the best possible time. If they leak it earlier, it looks like they’re trying to knock McCain out. If they leak it later, it looks like they’re trying to influence the general.”

• Steve Benen: “Now, reading through the Times’ very lengthy article, one notices that it feels at least a little thin. The evidence is hardly overwhelming, and the article is padded with extraneous details. [...] But one also gets the sense that this NYT piece is the opening salvo.”

• Ed Morrissey: “The New York Times launches its long-awaited smear of John McCain today, and the most impressive aspect of the smear is just how baseless it is.”

• Matt Welch: “The New York Times has uncorked a lengthy, long-awaited, weirdly written, (mostly) anonymously sourced, six-reporter article about John McCain that people will remember mostly for hinting in a not-quite-convincing way that he was having an extra-marital affair in the late 1990s with a telecom lobbyist three decades his junior.”

• Megan McArdle: “CNN notes ‘This may end up being a story about the New York Times as about John McCain.’ One does kind of wonder why they’re breaking an eight year-old story now.”

• Mary Katharine Ham: “This doesn’t reflect badly on anyone but the Times, as far as I’m concerned. The innuendo and full-on craptastic nature of the lede alone is enough to damn any actual facts that follow, which are few and far between.”

• Betsy Newmark: “It really is a nothingburger of a story all wrapped up with the sexual innuendo that McCain has been having an affair with an attractive lobbyist.”

• Steven Taylor: “Given that key portions of McCain’s appeal are supposed to be his character and his anti-corruption stances, this story has the potential to be quite damaging, especially if he ends up facing off against Obama, who has a visible, and seemingly quite stable, marriage1 and is running against lobbyists.”

• Mark Kleiman: “Apparently this has been an open secret for years. Personally, I don’t see anything wrong with a senator doing to a lobbyist what the lobbyists do to the rest of us. But it says something about a man’s morals when he isn’t even faithful to his trophy wife.”

• Pam Spaulding: “Just imagine all the moralist McCain haters on the far right are thinking right about now, after all, they all want into your bedroom and women’s wombs.”

• Digby: “I don’t know if McCain is crooked. But you have to wonder, after his close call with the Keating Five and public association with campaign finance reform, how anyone could be so arrogant as to think he could get away with this stuff if he actually became the Republican nominee?”

• Logan Murphy: “Could this be the reason Mike Huckabee is still hanging around and Mitt Romney merely suspended his campaign instead of ending it altogether?”

• Jane Hamsher: “No jokes about ‘lobbyists’ and ‘pork.’”

• Michelle Malkin: “If you lie down with MSM dogs, you wake up with stories like this.”

• John Hawkins: “When a Democrat is accused of some sort of affair, the mainstream media is extremely concerned about making 100% sure the story is drop dead accurate, down to the last detail, before they’ll even begin to think about printing the story. That’s why Drudge broke the Monica Lewinsky story to the public, not the MSM. It’s also why stories about affairs involving John Kerry, John Edwards, Barack Obama, and Bill Clinton have been buried or not printed at all in most MSM outlets over the last few years.”

• Brent Baker: “[Keith] Olbermann insisted the alleged efforts of staffers to ‘protect’ McCain sound ‘eerily similar’ to Clinton-Lewinsky. Later in his 45 minutes of ‘Breaking News’ coverage, Olbermann proposed: ‘If this doesn’t sound like deja vu all over again, I don’t know what does.””

• Dan Riehl: “When it falls to your lawyers to defend you on Fox, as Bennett is doing now for McCain, you’re screwed. McCain can survive it. But on top of Keating Five and who knows what else, this faux conservative is a flawed, old candidate.”

UPDATE: Politico reports that “Aides to Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) have released a remarkable 1,500-word document outlining what his campaign calls ’some of the facts that were provided to the New York Times but did not end up in the story.’” They reprint the document in its entirety; it’s basically a timeline refuting the dates and allegations in the story.

UPDATE: McCain has held a press conference denying the allegations.

“I’m very disappointed in the article. It’s not true,” the likely Republican presidential nominee said as his wife, Cindy, stood beside him during a news conference called to address the matter. “I’ve served this nation honorably for more than half a century,” said McCain, a four-term Arizona senator and former Navy pilot. “At no time have I ever done anything that would betray the public trust.” “I intend to move on,” he added.

McCain described the woman in question, lobbyist Vicki Iseman, as a friend.

The newspaper quoted anonymous aides as saying they had urged McCain and Iseman to stay away from each other prior to his failed presidential campaign in 2000. In its own follow-up story, The Washington Post quoted longtime aide John Weaver, who split with McCain last year, as saying he met with lobbyist Iseman and urged her to steer clear of McCain. Weaver told the Times he arranged the meeting before the 2000 campaign after “a discussion among the campaign leadership” about Iseman.

But McCain said he was unaware of any such conversation, and denied that his aides ever tried to talk to him about his interactions with Iseman. “I never discussed it with John Weaver. As far as I know, there was no necessity for it,” McCain said. “I don’t know anything about it,” he added. “John Weaver is a friend of mine. He remains a friend of mine. But I certainly didn’t know anything of that nature.”

His wife also said she was disappointed with the newspaper. “More importantly, my children and I not only trust my husband, but know that he would never do anything to not only disappoint our family, but disappoint the people of America. He’s a man of great character,” Cindy McCain said. The couple smiled throughout the questioning at a Toledo hotel.

McCain’s remaining rival for the Republican nomination, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, called McCain “a good decent honorable man” and said he accepted McCain’s response. “I’ve campaigned now on the same stage or platform with John McCain for 14 months. I only know him to be a man of integrity,” Huckabee said in Houston. “Today he denied any of that was true. I take him at his word. For me to get into it is completely immaterial.”

UPDATE: TNR’s Gabriel Sherman reports:

The publication of the article capped three months of intense internal deliberations at the Times over whether to publish the negative piece and its most explosive charge about the affair. It pitted the reporters investigating the story, who believed they had nailed it, against executive editor Bill Keller, who believed they hadn’t. It likely cost the paper one investigative reporter, who decided to leave in frustration. And the Times ended up publishing a piece in which the institutional tensions about just what the story should be are palpable.

via Ann Althouse @ Instapundit

Keith Olbermann has named Mary Katharine Ham the “Worst Person in the World” for expressing the view on CNN’s “Reliable Sources” that Bill Clinton has to be a bit stunned by the backlash over his negative campaigning on behalf of his wife because he was used to soft treatment from the press.

I think he’s sort of a victim of the — or not a victim, but he’s getting used to the 24-hour news cycle. When he was president, he was not subjected to quite as much scrutiny, and I think he got a lot of passes, and now he’s mad he’s not getting them anymore.

Olbermann gets positively apoplectic over this, making fun of Ham’s youth and pointing out that Clinton got the 24-hour news cycle in all its force during the Monica Lewinsky scandal and was, after all, impeached:

AllahPundit contends, “Nowhere did MK suggest that Clinton had gotten a pass about Monica, only that he’d gotten passes otherwise” but given the context of the “24-hour news cycle,” Olbermann’s interpretation isn’t unreasonable.

The so-called “CNN Effect” was in full swing by the time Clinton took office. Ham has a point though, that “the quick and constant fact-checking of the Internet” and the fact that “his mis-statements and blow-ups are routinely recorded and picked apart” are new advents. Matt Drudge made his name by scooping Newsweek on its own story with the Lewinsky affair but, for the most part, the pack mentality of the Big Media was all there was during Clinton’s time in office; the blogosphere kicked up the 24/7 scrutiny several notches.

Olbermann would be on much firmer ground here if he weren’t so over the top. While I’d argue that Clinton often benefited from a press corps that was sympathetic to his ideas and won over by his charm, it’s hard to make the case that he wasn’t subject to plenty of press scrutiny. But, surely, that’s not an argument worth blowing a gasket over.

While I realize that “Worst Person in the World” is one of Olbermann’s shticks and that it’s meant to be hyperbole, it’s really a bizarre title to bestow for expressing an opinion on such a minor issue.

Matt Drudge has the bold headline — but no flashing siren — TALK OF HILLARY EXIT ENGULFS CAMPAIGN.

Facing a double-digit defeat in New Hampshire, a sudden collapse in national polls and an expected fund-raising drought, Senator Hillary Clinton is preparing for a tough decision: Does she get out of the race? And when?!

“She can’t take multiple double-digit losses in New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada,” laments one top campaign insider to the DRUDGE REPORT. “If she gets too badly embarrassed, it will really harm her. She doesn’t want the Clinton brand to be damaged with back-to-back-to-back defeats.”

Meanwhile, Democrat hopeful John Edwards has confided to senior staff that he is staying in the race because Hillary “could soon be out.” “Her money is going to dry up,” Edwards confided, a top source said Monday morning.

Key players in Clinton’s inner circle are said to be split. James Carville is urging her to fight it out through at least February and Super Tuesday, where she has a shot at thwarting Barack Obama in a big state. But others close to the former first lady now see no possible road to victory, sources claim.

Even aside from the fact that this is on the Drudge report, this strikes me as wildly implausible. Unlike earlier reports that Fred Thompson would drop out after poor finishes in the early states, there’s just no reason for Clinton to quit. As noted in the previous post, she’s got more cash on hand than Obama and Edwards combined. And she’s got huge leads in several big states.

If, as looks increasingly likely, she loses badly tomorrow in New Hampshire, she’s going to feel as if the wind has been knocked out of her. She expected to win these two easily and then march on to a coronation. But the idea that she can’t afford to stay in the race through February 5th is just silly.

UPDATE: Dan Riehl engages in some interesting speculation: “One cannot be re-born until you die. What better way to do it than to plant the story of your demise, eventually pinning it on the underhanded dealings of a presumably noble competitor’s campaign?”

Lowering expectations has long been part of politics, in much the same as good football coaches traditionally “poor mouth” their own team while laying it on thick about how great their upcoming opponent is.

UPDATE: This counter, via myDD, provides some useful perspective:

(I’ve used a screencap for archival purposes; grab a live counter for either or both parties here.)

BREAKING NEWS (7/22/08): John Edwards Love Child Scandal Re-Erupts

A story entitled “NATIONAL ENQUIRER WORLD EXCLUSIVE: JOHN EDWARDS LOVE CHILD SCANDAL!” is the top story on memeorandum this morning.

The link now goes to an otherwise blank page with some advertising but, as you may have guessed from the subtle clues in the headline, it originally featured a story about a scandal involving John Edwards and a love child and was published by America’s newspaper of record, The National Enquirer. Here’s an excerpt from the story that was once there but no longer is:

The woman linked to Presidential candidate John Edwards in a cheating scandal is more than six months pregnant and telling a close confidante that Edwards is the father of her unborn child, The NATIONAL ENQUIRER has learned exclusively.

The NATIONAL ENQUIRER’s political bombshell comes just weeks after Edwards emphatically denied having an affair with Rielle Hunter, who formerly worked on his campaign.

But The ENQUIRER has now confirmed not only that Rielle is pregnant, but she is also living in Chapel Hill, N.C. in a gated community, just a few streets away from Andrew Young, who has been a key official in Edwards’ campaign.

The interest of the blogosphere was apparently engaged originally by Matt Drudge, who featured it as a developing story. Considering that Drudge did not use absolutely the biggest font available, much less a flashing siren, one wouldn’t think it would have gotten much attention. Slow news day, I guess.

Brian Maloney speculates, using apparently no evidence whatsoever, that this story is the work of the Hillary Clinton War Room. He has also gotten early reactions from Laura Ingraham and Mark Levin, who don’t have much useful to add. Interestingly, Hunter has a passing resemblance to Ingraham.

Mickey Kaus claims that, “I’m familiar with how the initial Rielle Hunter/Edwards rumors, true or not, got to at least one news outlet–and no campaigns, Dem or GOP, were involved. It was a story going around–I’d been hearing it for months. Not all rumors are plants. And some are true. Even in the Enquirer.” ObWi’s Publius thinks Kaus should be fired if the story turns out to be wrong. Because, you know, reporters are usually fired when they print rumors that don’t pan out.

Ace initially dismisses and then embraces the Hillary connection. Apparently, she’s friends with someone named Altman, who owns or is in a senior position at the Enquirer. (It turns out to be Robert Altman, who does indeed own the paper. See “The Clintonite who owns National Enquirer” for background.)

Anyway, Kaus observes that, if the story turns out to have legs, it will hurt Edwards because he “not very subtly put his wife’s illness. and his loyalty to her, near the center of his campaign.” For good measure, he supplies quotes along those lines.

Glenn Reynolds muses, “it makes no sense for Hillary to be spreading this story. Obama, on the other hand, would benefit from having Edwards out of the picture, giving him the undiluted anti-Hillary vote.”

Michael van der Galien figures the “Clinton campaign wouldn’t spread a rumor as vicious like this.” Or, upon reflection, “They wouldn’t spread the rumor if they weren’t 100% sure it’s true.”

As for myself, I’m leaving open the possibility that the story is untrue. It’s probable that Hunter is pregnant but the evidence that Edwards is the father is, as best I can determine, negligible. Sure, the National Enquirer is more believable than the New York Times. But they do get stories wrong every now and again.

Further, as Ace notes, “How dumb do you have to be to get a woman pregnant while running for president? I don’t think Edwards is that level of stupid.” Then again, Bill Clinton did things of similar stupidity throughout his career and it got him twelve years as governor and two terms as president.

Doug Ross and Death by 1000 Papercuts have the most exhaustive accounts of the story I’ve come across thus far.

The London Telegraph has been rolling out its list of the 100 Most Influential American Conservatives, twenty at a time, all week. The exercise has been somewhat dubious, clearly seeming to be aimed (successfully) at attracting attention from American bloggers, and I’ve refrained from commenting on it until now. They’ve now released the final installment, #1-20, and I must says it’s one poorly conceived list. Or, mere precisely, it’s a pretty good list but a simply bizarre ranking.

Rudy Giuliani tops it, followed by David Petraeus, Matt Drudge, Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, Dick Cheney, Bob Gates, John Roberts, John McCain, Mitt Romney, and Mike Huckabee.

Now, most obviously, how does George W. Bush, the sitting president, not top the list? One could argue, as many have, that he’s not really a conservative. But, then again, it would be rather easy to make that argument about Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney. Bush actually comes in at #21. The explanation?

Bush fails to make our top 20 list because of his failure to shape conservatism or the Republican party despite an historic opportunity to do so after 2002. When he leaves office, his political influence looks likely to all but disappear.

Oh, he’s certainly shaped conservatism and the party. And his influence will certainly be around once he’s out of office: He’s committed us to wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that will be ongoing, has two Supreme Court Justices who will long survive him, and has set all sorts of policies into motion that will be difficult to undo.

How in the world can Giuliani, a mere candidate for president, be ranked ahead of the people actually charged with administering American policy? And, really, Huckabee is more powerful than, say, Arnold Schwarzenegger?

How does Mike Pence (#19) get ranked ahead of all other Members of Congress? Not only are there many senior to him, many serving as ranking members of important committees, but there are some, notably Tom Coburn, who are more actively shaping the conservative movement.

Whether David Petraeus and some of the other military officers on the list (the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs comes in 98 places behind Petraeus) should be considered “conservatives” is itself questionable. Surely, if that’s the case, the country is in trouble if a Democrat should succeed Bush as president.

Surely, Christopher Hitchens, who comes in at #27, has to be mortified. First, he would likely consider the label “conservative” a grave insult. Second, if he’s a conservative, he’s certainly more influential than several of the people listed ahead of him.

I suppose the main point of these lists is to generate discussion and this one has achieved that. But, surely, they could have at least made some effort at coming up with a good ranking.

To the surprise of perhaps no one but Matt Drudge, Don Imus is getting another shot at talk radio.

In a dramatic and dazzling career rebound, controversial radio host Don Imus has secured a deal returning him to the airwaves on December 3 — this time on the nation’s most listened to talk station, the DRUDGE REPORT has learned!

“Imus In The Morning” will make a high-impact resurrection on WABC in New York City, top sources reveal. “We’ll have him on a standard 40-second delay,” a studio source explains. “Don is rested, humbled, and ready for war!”

Specific terms of the deal will not be released, but the host, who was fired by CBS and MSNBC after making disparaging comments about the Rutgers women’s basketball team, has inked a eight-figure, multiyear contract with WABC parent company, CITADEL BROADCASTING.

But who will his GUESTS be? Will senators come on? Presidential candidates? Tim Russert? Anna Quindlen? Who’s the guest now? WILL THE ELITES TURN THEIR BACK ON HIM?

My guess is that, while they’ll be timid at first, THE ELITES WILL BE BACK. People who liked Imus before the Rutgers incident will CONTINUE TO LIKE HIM, which means he’ll have a HUGE AUDIENCE again. Politicians aren’t going to turn down an opportunity to talk to millions of the most politically active voters over a comedy bit gone wrong.

When I saw the headline “Reid labels military leader ‘incompetent’” in my aggregator yesterday and then saw various bloggers citing the story about the Senate Majority Leader making disparaging remarks about the outgoing Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, I didn’t think much of it. After all, Reid is against the war, Pace is widely regarded by war critics as a “Yes man,” and Reid has a record since ascending to his current position of spicing up his rhetoric. So, the various strum and drang over the remarks struck me as unwarranted.

Bob Geiger, who was on the conference call in question, says The Politico’s John Bresnahan, who broke the story in question, got it wrong when he reported that Pace “…called Marine Gen. Peter Pace, the outgoing chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, ‘incompetent’ during an interview Tuesday with a group of liberal bloggers, a comment that was never reported.”

So, Reid didn’t say Pace was incompetent? Well, no, but the context was wrong.

What he said about Pace was not said in the spirit of throwing some rhetorical red meat to a bunch of liberal bloggers by gratuitously bashing General Pace — which is certainly what one could infer from The Politicos “reporting” on this story.

Rather, Reid was talking informally about George W. Bush’s refusal to dump Alberto Gonzales and told us what he said to Pace in a private meeting before Bush tossed aside the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff like a rotting fish.

Here’s exactly what Reid said:

“I guess the president, uh, he’s gotten rid of Pace because he could not get him confirmed here in the Senate… Pace is also a yes-man for the president and I told him to his face, I laid it out to him last time he came to see me, I told him what an incompetent man I thought he was.”

So, did Reid utter the word “incompetent” in the same sentence with General Pace’s name on the conference call? Yes, he did.

But in the context in which it was said — and based on Reid’s tendency to speak like the straight-talking, former boxer that he is — it all makes sense. And to those of us not looking for a Matt Drudge-worthy story, it hardly seemed remarkable.

Got that? Yes, Reid called Pace “incompetent,” but he did it in the spirit of assessing Pace’s competence. I’m glad we cleared that up!

Indeed, Fox News reports, “Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid confirmed Thursday that he told liberal bloggers last week that he thinks outgoing Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Peter Pace is ‘incompetent.’”

Reid’s predecessor, Bill Frist, laments Reid’s decision to “attack the uniformed military leaders who are working tirelessly to improve the situation in Iraq.”

Politicians walk a dangerous tightrope when they politicize military affairs, either by lambasting professional military officers or hiding behind them (e.g., arguments that criticizing a war is tantamount to not “supporting the troops”). One legacy of the bitter debate over Vietnam was a military officer corps that became partisan, barely concealing its contempt for Democrats, including commanders-in-chief Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. The less we use military officers as props in political debates and keep the discussion on the level of elected policy-makers, the better.

At the same time, Steve Benen and Kevin Drum are right: The senior-most members of the armed forces, certainly the service chiefs and Chairman, are policy makers and fair game for criticism.

Pace, if he’s doing his job, is not some platoon leader, or even division commander, merely carrying out his orders to the best of his ability. Rather, he is — by statute — the chief military advisor to the president. One can not discuss military affairs, let alone the conduct of a war, without implicating his decision-making.

Further, if politicians can sing David Petraeus’ praises as a military genius (because he, as a senior general, single handedly invented counterinsurgency doctrine) then why can’t they criticize those, like Pace and George Casey, whose decisions they deem poor?

If Reid were making personal attacks on our officer corps or soldiers, I’d be the first in line to say that was beyond the pale. But criticizing the technical and tactical judgments of senior appointees who must be confirmed by the Senate? Not so much.

UPDATE: Taking slightly different angles, Ed Morrissey questions Reid’s competence (also fair game) and Taylor Marsh argues that “this is a gift for the Republicans.”

Jennifer Hunter’s survey of bloggers at the California State Democratic Convention has raised the hackles of a few bloggers. At issue is this passage:

But Sree Sreenivasan, new media professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, says the effectiveness of Web sites and blogs as political tools may only go so far: “It’s still a small percentage of people using these technologies.”

Most are young and what Sreenivasan terms “early adaptors.” And, as he concludes, the impact of young voters “is notoriously hard to predict.” It was thought they were going to turn out in big numbers in 2004 but that didn’t happen.

In the end, who has time to blog? After reading four newspapers each day and my e-mails and doing my work, I’ve had it. Blogging remains a luxury for the young — or the bored.

FireDogLake’s Jane Hamsher, for one, is tired of the “teenagers in their pajamas” myth and points to this from the most recent BlogAds survey results: “The median political blog reader is a 43 year old man with an annual family income of $80,000. He reads 6 blogs a day for 10 hours a week. 39% have post-graduate degrees. 70% have contributed to a campaign.” DailyKos diarist MissLaura points to similar results from a Pew survey.

Seeing the Forest’s Dave Johnson thinks the persistence of this myth in the mainstream press is a deliberate attempt to sabotage the credibility of the competition. My guess is that, rather than being anything so sinister, this is a function of outsiders still not being able to differentiate blogs from other online venues, let alone influential political blogs from the diary blogs.

I continually see things like Drudge Report, Democratic Underground, Free Republic, and Lucianne referred to as “blogs.” They’re not. If a site does not have permanent archives, arranged in a chronological order, it simply isn’t a blog. Remember, the term is a short form of “Web log,” a running diary of online commentary. Indeed, a del.icio.us page is closer to a blog than Matt Drudge’s site.

Technorati tracks some 70 million blogs, although the vast majority of those are defunct or automated scraper sites set up to generate Google Adsense revenue through mining of keywords from others’ published work. Of the active, “legitimate” sites, most are essentially online diaries, describing what the author had for lunch or watched on television.

The sites that engage in serious political commentary (including humorous satire) are a small fraction of the blog universe. A smaller fraction still have an audience of any consequence (say, 100 unique readers a day). In the context of discussing the influence of blogs on the political process, it is this last group that should be the subject of focus. Lumping them in with the mySpace pages, discussion boards, and personal diary sites is either ignorant, unserious, or dishonest.

Hotline is dubious of Matt Drudge’s skills and suspects foul play:

Suddenly, Drudge has sophisticated image capturing software and a detailed obsession with the nooks and blemishes on Sen. John McCain’s head? Nah. This is a tasteless bit of oppo sent Drudge’s way by an overconfident opponent of McCain’s who wants to exploit McCain’s vulnerable political status right now by forcing the campaign to answer questions about his age and health.

It wouldn’t surprise me in the least were another candidate’s team behind this, although either of the shots at the link could have been taken by a blind chimp with a cell phone camera; they’re not exactly state-of-the-art.

Drudge is an annoying propagandist, to be sure, but touting controversial issues is what he does for a living. Further, it’s not unreasonable to be curious about the health of a 70-year-old man who has had skin cancer on three separate occasions, let alone one who spent five years being tortured by the Viet Cong.

In any case, I got a chuckle out of this closing to the Hotline article:

We’re not accusing anyone — we’re just accusing someone. Just not sure who.

Heh.

Jeff Jarvis is “reinventing TV,” along with a few thousand other folks, on the Internet.

In the evolution of the new TV, this is 1954: Arthur Godfrey and Friends, My Little Margie, the Adventures or RinTinTin. That was not the golden age of TV. TV then sucked. But it got better. So will ours.

One would hope. The convergence of “Old Media” and “New Media” is an interesting, and ongoing, process. Indeed, as with anything else, what’s new eventually becomes old. Rush Limbaugh and Matt Drudge are now Old Media. CNN is really old media. All were revolutionary in their day.

Jarvis is right, though, that a big hurdle–in addition to producing something actually worthwhile–is finding a business model that works.

Joe Biden is set to launch his second run for the presidency today but it will likely be overshadowed by some candid comments made in an interview with Jason Horowitz of the New York Observer.

Most noteworthy is what he says about Barack Obama: “I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy,” he said. “I mean, that’s a storybook, man.”

Not surprisingly, Matt Drudge is all over it:

I’m already getting e-mails from GOP operatives touting this, too.

Presuming Biden is being accurately quoted here–which is never a safe assumption with the press–it seems obvious that he left out a rather key phrase (which may have been implied by the context of the larger conversation): “presidential candidate.” And I presume by “clean” he means “clean-cut” rather than “bathes regularly.”

If the quote is, “I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American presidential candidate who is articulate and bright and clean-cut and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that’s a storybook, man,” it’s rather unobjectionable. Indeed, I’ve said much the same thing myself.

Jesse Jackson is articulate, bright, and relatively clean-cut; he’s not mainstream. Al Sharpton is bright and articulate but not particularly clean-cut, let alone meanstream. Colin Powell was articulate, bright, clean-cut and mainstream, but not a presidential candidate.

While it’s true that Democrats seem to get more of a pass than Republicans on these sorts of things from both the press and the civil rights establishment, these things always have a context. Aside from an unfortunate joke about the tendency of convenience stores to be run by Indians, which is so obviously true that “The Simpsons” has been running with it for 15-odd years, there’s no evidence of which I’m aware that Biden is racist. By contrast, the “Macaca” flap that ultimately killed George Allen’s candidacy fit in with a lot of circumstantial evidence that was part of a pre-existing “Confederate sympathizing redneck poseur” image.

UPDATE: Steve Verdon suggests in the comments, “I would think clean as in no skeletons in his closet.” That actually makes even more sense. The analysis fits just as well with the above-mentioned candidates. It also covers Carol Moseley-Braun who, I’m reminded, was technically a presidential candidate in 2004 but who decidedly had skeletons in her closet. I’d argue she was also outside-the-mainstream and certainly not “bright” in the same sense as the others.

UPDATE: Nothing at Memeorandum so far. Not a whole lot at Technorati just yet, either. I suspect that will change.

• PJM in Barcelona titles his post, “First Day in the Race, First Faux Pas.”
• Election Geek Blog follows suit: “Joe Biden: A Major Mistake So Early in the Game?”
• Sensible Mom: “Has he never met an educated black man (or are they all considered Uncle Tom’s by people like Biden)? Talk about the soft racism of low expectations.”
• Michelle Malkin: “Who will press Joe Biden to name the names of the inarticulate and dim and dirty and unattractive African-Americans he was thinking about when he, um, complimented Barack Obama?”
• Curt @ Flopping Aces: “So was this a five minute Presidential candidacy or what?”
• Mary Katharine Ham: “A clean black man? The first black guy on the American political scene who can both shower regularly and speak properly? Is that really what Biden thinks?”

Nor is the hammering just from the Right:

• Marcos “Kos” Moulitas: “Really, if we live in a just world, this will be the end of Joe Biden’s political career.”
• Duncan “Atrios” Black: “The are more and less charitable readings of what Biden said, but there’s no way to read it which doesn’t reflect very poorly on Biden.”
• Josh Marshall: “. . . I think at this point you have to say that Biden suffers from what one might with real generosity call chronic racial grandpaism. That is to say, the penchant for making comments that are not only racially offensive but also extremely silly . . . .”

Hmm. It seems that I’m virtually alone in seeing a perfectly innocent explanation for this one.

UPDATE: Steven Taylor has a video collection of Biden saying stupid things.