Teh Red Sea parted and teh heavens opened, and our president got a positive notice from Matthew Yglesias, writing from his new digs:

Call me crazy, but I think Bob Costas’s interview of George W. Bush has been way more enlightening and substantive than what you typically see when people interview politicians. No horse race stuff, no goofy gotchas — just serious questions about the US-China relationship and the conflict in Georgia along with, of course, some stuff about sports thrown in. If you could see that kind of attitude brought to Meet The Press, I think it’d be a good thing.

What’s more, to his credit faced with serious questions Bush mostly gave serious, reasonably impressive answers (UPDATE: Of course there was the “I don’t see America having problems” moment, but still…) .

One of the commenters was pretty impressed, too:

Maybe it’s because he was talking to a sportscaster and, in part, about sports, but I think a big part of the success of the interview (on both sides) was that Bush actually seemed both to know what he was talking about, and care about it. He wasn’t saying anything totally remarkable about US-China relations, but he was also very much not taking the neocon Great Powers Conflict line on China. Which is of course exactly what McCain is doing.

Overall, just kind of bizarre in that Bush wasn’t totally embarrassing or terrifying. And kudos to Costas for an excellent job.

Whoa!

I guess I’d better rewind the TiVo and watch that interview.

Here’s one of the shrewdest takes on Elizabeth Edwards’s behavior in the unfortunate incident involving her weasel of a husband, from Hanna Rosin at the XX Factor [e.a.]:

I find this Elizabeth Edwards post on Daily Kos excruciating. We are supposed to ride with this couple through her cancer diagnosis and relapse, through their son’s death, their fertility treatments, and the rededication of their marriage, but then we are supposed to butt the hell out when the story line veers from the tragedy and heroics. If you believe in a system, you have to live and die by it. Elizabeth Edwards buys into the culture of overconfession. She is an obsessive blogger, for God’s sake. You can’t just get suddenly pissed off because the confessional culture came back to bite you. A “string of hurtful and absurd lies in a tabloid publication”???

Yes, that was a huge mistake on the part of the Edwardses. It was they who put their great marriage front and center in his campaign, as Kaus wrote recently, when he was explaining why it’s important for the MSM to cover this story.:

Edwards’ most effective anecdote this year, however, was probably the story of his popular wife Elizabeths’ struggle against cancer. He made it the emotional center of a TV ad:

And Elizabeth and I decided in the quiet of a hospital room, after 12 hours of tests and after getting very bad news, what we were going to spend our lives doing. For all those that have no voice. We are not going to quietly go away.

During a joint 60 Minutes interview focusing on his wife’s illness, Edwards explicitly linked his behavior in that struggle and his fitness for public office:

Katie Couric:
Some have suggested that you’re capitalizing on this.

John Edwards:
Here’s what I would say about that.

First of all, there’s not a single person in America that should vote for me because Elizabeth has cancer. Not a one. ..[snip]

But, I think every single candidate for president, Republican and Democratic have lives, personal lives, that indicate something about what kind of human being they are. And I think it is a fair evaluation for America to engage in to look at what kind of human beings each of us are, and what kind of president we’d make. [E.A.]

Once Edwards brought America into his family’s private hell, all other bets were off and there was no more “zone of privacy.”

Soon it won’t only be the tabloids snooping into politicians’ affairs. This is the era of the citizen journalist, after all. And if the mainstream media proves itself too squeamish or “high-class” to report on these kinds of things—which involve lies, cover-ups, hush money, personal betrayals, and which speak directly to the issue of character—you can be sure after this major breach of the public trust from a former presidential candidate and his wife, a lot of freelancers will be operating in this territory from now on.

The public may not have a “right” to know, but the public wants to know the whole story—including the sordid stuff. Fairy tales they can get in People magazine. They want the full range of possible fabrications and truths about celebrities (and politicians), including the dirt.

Michael Crowley characterizes his worries about the Dems’ convention as “hand-wringing.”

More handwringing about Obama’s optics: I see that tickets for his acceptance speech at Denver’s Invesco Field stadium sold out instantly. In light of the apparent traction Republicans got with their ‘Celebrity’ meme you have to wonder if the Obama team is reconsidering the wisdom of this move. I would recommend any possible stagecraft to minimize the event’s scale.

For the most part, his commenters disagree with him—many of them snottily. Here are a couple of the more polite responses [e.a.]:

August 8, 2008 1:02 PM This strikes me as a terrible overreaction. That Obama is well-liked, able to stir crowds and capable of motivating previously disaffected voters is the overarching story here, not his supposed “celebrity.” That line of attack was a stupid ploy that’s been ridiculed even by many of McCain’s supporters. I see no reason to let the Republicans’ boneheaded taunts scare Obama into diminishing his popularity.

That was true before McCain launched his “celebrity” line of attack. It isn’t true now, according to the London Telegraph, which isn’t quite so caught up in the minute-by-minute state of play as we are:

The punchline is this: the more seriously he took himself, the more Barack Obama has become a laughing matter.

Only a month ago American comedians and satirists were complaining that they found it hard to get people to laugh at the first black presidential nominee. A New Yorker cover cartoon showing him as a Muslim extremist was roundly denounced.

But growing Obama fatigue among voters after his pseudo-presidential visit to Europe and the Middle East has unleashed a wave of satirical fire, mocking Mr Obama for his apparent belief that he has the election in the bag.

Another one of Crowley’s commenters writes:

August 8, 2008 1:08 PM Right. Obama should pretend he’s as unpopular with the Democratic base as McCain is with the Republican base. Maybe they should put him in front of a green screen and have him mumble about compromise and bipartisanship: that will get out the vote. Look, Obama’s ability to motivate new voters to register and exercise the franchise will give him a serious advantage in November, and this venue is a way for him to do that. If the Republicans want to equate Invesco with a Nuremberg rally, let them have at it. I think that there are plenty of ways to counter that. Who would you want to support: the fresh guy who inspires or the old doddering flip-flopper who ridicules large-participation in the electoral process? Yes, that is a simplistic formulation, but so is McCain’s idiotic celebrity meme. And Obama’s path actually gets people to the polls.

I agree with the point in bold, too. It would be risky to make too much of the “empty suit” meme, and it is certainly politically risky to accuse Obama’s followers—every single one of them a potential voter—of being cultists. Some of them are, but many of them are not.

He is inspiring, and he has inspired a lot of people to pay attention to politics, which is a tremendous accomplishment, since most people (everywhere) prefer to go about their daily lives and to be narcotized rather than to pay attention to the outside world…until it impinges on their freedom.

They certainly prefer watching to reading books. Even in Russia! (home of the ultra-serious, morally purposeful writer)!

I was pretty surprised to read that in addition to being involved in a shooting war, Russia and Georgia are also involved in a PR war—at the same time:

Armed not just with guns but public relations agencies, Russia and Georgia are fighting a propaganda war to shape public opinion at home and abroad with a constant stream of disputed facts about their conflict. …

Both sides are employing Brussels-based public relations specialists who arranged a succession of conference calls for the international media in recent days, with senior government figures striving to put their side of the story across first.

Russia wants to convince the world of its role as an honest broker, reluctantly intervening against an out-of-control Georgian president whose forces have carried out ethnic cleansing against the Ossetian people.

Georgia in turn portrays itself as a plucky little country fighting off the resurgent Russian bear and suffering unfair Kremlin punishment on account of its drive to become a Western democracy and NATO ally. …

But the spin hasn’t helped clarify the many disputed facts.

You don’t say! But war isn’t about facts! It’s all about spin.

Stanley Bing was writing about business war in Sun Tzu Was a Sissy:  But what he says is still to the point:

Let’s take a minute about your PR effort.

Jesus himself had the four apostles, plus, at a later date, Mel Gibson. Samuel Johnson, a fat, witty guy who illuminated the 18th century, had a talented scribe named Boswell, who followed him around and captured his every fatuity. Trump has himself. Every war master controls the story while the whole thing is going on. You always know that a side has lost a war when they lose control of the press.

The thing you need to know about the press, if you have any dealings with the nice, smart people who do that grubby job, is that the thing they want most is a story. If there is no story, still they want a story. Stories they like:

fiduciariy irresponsibility

sex stuff

cultural dissonance

celebrity gossip/factoids

The most important thing for them, without fail, is the need to feed the beast every day. Think about it.They have a hundred pages of content to frame around their advertising each time they show up at work. Imagine that. It’s tough. So if you give them a story, no matter how gooshy, fractile, or brain damaged, they will listen. This is terrific for you in your war, because if you are [as] aggressive in this sphere as you are on the battlefield, you will define the way the war is perceived, and that, my friends is the whole deal.

(pp. 166-67)

The New York Post addresses the problem of how to actually turn out the youth vote that promised itself to Barack Obama a while back:

Branding. One way to pierce young voters’ attention barrier is to market yourself like the products they love. And this is something the Obama campaign understands exceptionally well - the importance of OBAMA™. From the elegant serif font on their website to their use (and occasional overuse) of the campaign’s logo to their Madison Avenue-like slogans, the Obama campaign distances itself from the stodgy, haphazard presentation of a traditional political campaign. Obama is the Mac to John McCain’s PC.

Issue Focus. Being cool needn’t mean dumbed down. Young voters are increasingly knowledgeable about politics - a Pew Research Center poll released in July found that voters aged 30 or younger were better informed than their older peers on issues like Iraq and abortion. To connect with the young voter means understanding those issues that are most important to them. One such issue is the environment. … Another issue important to young voters, though it requires somewhat more political courage, is civil rights for gays and lesbians, support for which is very strongly correlated with age. …

Face Time. Ultimately, however, the trickiest issue in motivating the youth vote may be that young voters have too many things they want to do, and not enough time to do it. They are not as likely as older voters to be engaged in the campaign through traditional means like reading newspapers or watching cable news. As such, the campaign needs to get in front of them - in both real and virtual ways. …

If you ask me, this sounds like Obama’s entire campaign strategy: heavy on branding and one or two issues andpseudonews- and image-making and light on everything else.

But maybe that’s just me. On the other hand, this celebrity-marketing strategy is responsible for the fact that Obama is seen a celebrity, who elicits squeals of delight, rather than as a personage of some import—like, say, the president of the United States.

Phelps swam 1.41 seconds faster than his world-record time at the United States Olympic trials in July. His face widened in surprise when he saw his time on the large videoboard. He glanced at the stands, where President Bush was vigorously waving an American flag, and gave him a nod.

“That’s a pretty special feeling,” Phelps said.

Well, I’m glad that some people still think so.