All Blog Posts from Public Eye

"I don't know if I would have advised (the candidates) to avoid free television time, whether it's on Fox or Al Jazeera."

-- Keith Olbermann, on the decision of many Democratic presidential candidates to not participate in a Fox News Channel debate. (From a report by Aaron Barnhart.)

Maybe/sorta/kinda presidential candidate Fred Thompson appeared on the “Tonight Show” last night and told Jay Leno’s chin that he was still “testing the waters.”

So we’ve got Fred Thompson still flirting, dipping his toe in the pool, formally “exploring” and sort of going steady with the idea of running for president. We’ve got Newt Gingrich still wondering if the political climate calls for his candidacy – sort of a “I’m still seeing other people” with a presidential run. What’s going on? Bloomberg? Gore? Hello?

It’s been noted by better minds than I that the presidential candidacy game has gotten out downright bizarre – if you’re a politician, you say you’re thinking about it; you say you’re gonna announce soon; then you announce. It’s the political equivalent of rinse, lather, repeat. I doubt that I was the only American who saw Bill Richardson’s official announcement and responded: “He wasn’t running already?”

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What is the sound of one voice debating? We may find out this fall.

Yesterday, Chris Dodd and Bill Richardson became the latest Democratic presidential candidates to decide that they will not participate in this fall’s Fox News Channel debate, which is co-sponsored by the Congressional Black Caucus.

According to the AP article:

The debate exodus began two months ago when John Edwards became the first candidate to announce that he would not attend the Sept. 23 debate in Detroit. A week later, Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama announced they also would not participate.

This leaves only Joe Biden, Dennis Kucinich and Mike Gravel as the candidates who haven’t yet backed out of the event, making America rethink whether good things come in threes. Why are the candidates voluntarily withdrawing from a chance to get their message across to the largest prime-time audience in cable news? Pressure from two online organizations – ColorForChange and MoveOn – who accuse the "Fair and Balanced" news network of being “hostile to the interests of Black America.”

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President Grant for President!

Anybody who tuned into HBO on Sunday expecting to see “The Sopranos” -- but got “Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee” instead -- might have gotten a glimpse of the future. Fred Thompson – the cause celebre celeb of current GOP politics – appeared in the drama as President Ulysses S. Grant. And now (bada bing! to those suffering Sopranos withdrawal) Thompson has announced he is unofficially making it official (maybe) and launching an investigative committee to “test the waters” about a presidential bid. He may make it officially official around Independence Day, but it all depends on how the investigating goes. Or something.

In any event, as is the case with all such pseudo-announcements, the immediate coverage follows the At Whose Expense breadcrumbs:

Thompson's candidacy could hurt [Mitt] Romney, who is trying to position himself to the right of the major candidates in the field despite his equivocations on various issues and outright position changes on others.

It's also possible that Thompson could pull support from McCain. They have similar records in the Senate, and Thompson could be seen as a fresher face. He was one of a handful of senators who backed McCain in 2000 over George W. Bush.

Giuliani could be hindered as well if Thompson grabs the attention of Republicans who are looking for a candidate to beat Democrats in the fall but are uneasy with the former New York City mayor's support for gay and abortion rights.

So there you have it, plain as day: If Thompson decides to run, it will either hurt Romney, McCain or Giuliani. (Won’t anybody think of Ron Paul?)

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Hillary Clinton’s political baggage being recycled in two upcoming books. Mitt Romney’s romantic past with his wife investigated. Not only have the debates and the rituals of presidential campaigning bloomed early this year -- does the political calendar have global warming, too? – but so has the information warfare that makes political enemies smirk and political allies shift uncomfortably in their seats.

In this week’s edition of National Journal, political writer Carl Cannon is the most recent observer to wonder publicly where the line is between Relevant and Prurient. He writes:

[The 2008 race] is a wide-open field with some 20 announced and unannounced candidates, a group replete with enough messy divorces, troubled marriages, second (and third) marriages, estranged children, cancer survivors, head cases, and binge dieters to satisfy any soap opera …The gaggle of 2008 candidates will be acting out their various pathologies in a technological environment more suited for entertainment than for serious policy discussion. YouTube, the blogs, and an unfettered cable culture did not exist in 1988 and 1992, the years that the privacy barriers came tumbling down. They do now.

The upshot is a combustible mix that is prompting political observers to wonder whether the process will dissuade good people from even bothering with politics -- or whether that has already happened.

True, there used to be a line between “reportable” and “keep this out of the papers,” but in recent years it’s gotten rubbed out. Making things even more nebulous is the fact that each one creates a political Rorschach test. If you’re a fan of Mitt Romney, than you think that Mike Wallace was unprofessional when he asked if there had been any premarital sex before Mitt and his wife tied the knot – but if you’re an Obama fan, you may not have found it inappropriate. Likewise, Bill Richardson’s supporters aren’t fans of the Albequerque reporter who asked him if he had “a bimbo problem.”

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