[reposted, with a new title, cause WordPress is acting up]

Obama rebukes Wesley Clark for saying that McCain’s service to his country was no biggie when it comes to deciding who should run the country.

Josh Marshall thinks it’s a cop-out and that Democrats shouldn’t be afraid to take on McCain’s war record.

John Aravosis wants to know: “Honestly, besides being tortured, what did McCain do to excel in the military?”

For his part, Barack Obama is now not only the proud bearer of a flag pin on his lapel but also a true-blue American patriot, who is offended by MoveOn.org’s accusing General David Petraeus of betrayal.

Now, that is a pivot. And Obama is very smart to execute it, and to run like hell away from attacks on John McCain’s record and character.

p.s. For the record, here’s something John McCain wrote in his 1974 thesis. I’d lay odds that Obama has read it, and everything else McCain has written, and knows a lot better than to attack McCain on his strengths [e.a.]:

[McCain's] fellow prisoners say his [forced] capitulation only redoubled his determination to provoke his captors. “Acts of defiance felt so good that I felt they more than compensated for their repercussions,” he wrote, “and they helped me keep at bay the unsettled feelings of guilt and self doubt my [false] confession had aroused.”

Don’t you hate it when David Brooks uses his New York Times perch to remind his readers that life is full of unexpected turns, expecially ones that reflect well on BushHitler?

Bush is a stubborn man. Well, without that stubbornness, that unwillingness to accept defeat on his watch, he never would have bucked the opposition to the surge.

Bush is an outrageously self-confident man. Well, without that self-confidence he never would have overruled his generals. … The additional fact is that Bush, who made such bad calls early in the war, made a courageous and astute decision in 2006. More than a year on, the surge has produced large, if tenuous, gains. Violence is down sharply. Daily life has improved. Iraqi security forces have been given time to become a more effective fighting force. The Iraqi government is showing signs of strength and even glimmers of impartiality. Iraq has moved from being a failed state to, as Vali Nasr of the Council on Foreign Relations has put it, merely a fragile one.

The whole episode is a reminder that history is a complicated thing. The traits that lead to disaster in certain circumstances are the very ones that come in handy in others. The people who seem so smart at some moments seem incredibly foolish in others.

Yep. (This also applies to Brooks, by the way, who referred to the Iraq war as “a disaster” many times during what he now refers to as “the dark days of 2006.”) He’s not humble enough to acknowledge his own previous cocksureness and foolishness. But he’s out there on the cutting edge of what should be opinion right now. We’ll see how it plays.

Brooks sets the stage:

The cocksure war supporters learned this humbling lesson [about orthodox thinking] during the dark days of 2006. And now the cocksure surge opponents, drunk on their own vindication, will get to enjoy their season of humility. They have already gone through the stages of intellectual denial. First, they simply disbelieved that the surge and the Petraeus strategy was doing any good. Then they accused people who noticed progress in Iraq of duplicity and derangement. Then they acknowledged military, but not political, progress. Lately they have skipped over to the argument that Iraq is progressing so well that the U.S. forces can quickly come home.

But before long, the more honest among the surge opponents will concede that Bush, that supposed dolt, actually got one right. Some brave souls might even concede that if the U.S. had withdrawn in the depths of the chaos, the world would be in worse shape today.

It’s unlikely that there will be many such souls, but count me among those who grudgingly (grudgingly because we are of a certain [anti-Vietnam War] age) admit that Bush’s stubbornness has, on balance, been a good thing for America in the immediate wake of 9/11. Many of America’s cocksure enemies have stood down in the wake of Bush’s cowboy-like cocksure aggressiveness. Bush himself has said he regrets the language he used; I didn’t hear him say that he regrets his “going on offense” against America’s enemies, as indeed he shouldn’t.

Something else has been gained in these long seven years. Brooks doesn’t mention it, but I will:L Islamism now has many respectable enemies—including several of Britain’s most famous public intellectuals and novelists.

The New York Times doesn’t quite approve of such heterodox thoughts as this one expressed by Ian McEwan, the author of Atonement:

“As soon as a writer expresses an opinion against Islamism, immediately someone on the left leaps to his feet and claims that because the majority of Muslims are dark skinned, he who criticizes it is racist.” He added: “This is logically absurd and morally unacceptable. Martin is not a racist. And I myself despise Islamism, because it wants to create a society that I detest, based on religious belief, on a text, on lack of freedom for women, intolerance towards homosexuality and so on — we know it well.”

The Independent, a British paper, referred to McEwan’s words as

an astonishingly strong attack on Islamism

and pointed out that these words could,

in today’s febrile legalistic climate, lay him open to being investigated for a “hate crime”.

Despite adding to the “febrile” climate surrounding this issue, at least the Independent is honest enough to give a full airing to McEwan’s views, which I reprint here with some emphasis [e.a.]:

McEwan – author of On Chesil Beach and the acclaimed Atonement and Enduring Love – has spoken on the issue of Islamism before, telling The New York Times last December: “All religions make very big claims about the world, and it should be possible in an open society to dispute them. It should be possible to say, ‘I find some ideas in Islam questionable’ without being called a racist.”

But his words in the Corriere interview are far stronger, although they do fall short of the invective deployed by Martin Amis. He has said “the Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order”, and told The Independent’s columnist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, a Muslim, in an open letter: “Islamism, in most of its manifestations, not only wants to kill me – it wants to kill you.”

McEwan’s interviewer pointed out that there exist equally hard-line schools of thought within Christianity, for example in the United States. “I find them equally absurd,” McEwan replied. “I don’t like these medieval visions of the world according to which God is coming to save the faithful and to damn the others. But those American Christians don’t want to kill anyone in my city, that’s the difference.”

But McEwan’s specific irritation is reserved for those who find ideological grounds to condemn his and Amis’s views. “When you ask a novelist or a poet about his vision regarding an aspect of the world, you don’t get the response of a politician or a sociologist, but even if you don’t like what he says you have to accept it, you can’t react with defamation. Martin is not a racist, and neither am I.”

Thank you, Ian McEwan. And may others join you in perpetrating the “hate crime” of speaking out in favor of freedom of expression, even (perhaps especially) when your ideas are out of favor with “expert and elite opinion” [Brooks's phrase].

Matthew Yglesias finds himself in the extremely awkward position of having to praise Tim Russert after having damned him mere months ago.

It’s a bit hard to know what to say when an important public figure whose work you didn’t really care for passes. … Nobody can become as important as Russert was without doing some stuff that some people think was bad. [Ooooh, they did "stuff" that "some" people "think" was "bad," so that "bad stuff" warrants articles by pompous whippersnappers titled "The Unbearable Inanity of Tim Russert"?   ---ed.] Thus, when The Atlantic asked me to do a Current item on Russert’s passing, I thought I’d take a mixed approach that doesn’t back down from criticism, while trying to be magnanimous in recognizing his considerable accomplishments.

How very magnanimous from the deep new-media thinker (and, I can’t help but note) supporter of Barack “Mr. New Politics” Obama.

Yglesias’s commenters need to be dressed down, says Ann Althouse, who isn’t normally given to policing.

I think the whippersnapper should produce a respectable body of work before he casually slings arrows at writers whom he attacks as somehow unfairly privileged [e.a.]:

Similarly, given Packer’s dystopian vision of American discourse, it’s hard to understand how Packer’s book, The Assassin’s Gate, sold so many copies and attracted such wide praise or how Packer came to have a job with the most prestigious magazine in the country – a magazine which published a lot of basically pro-war material in 2002 and 2003 and went on to vociferously denounce George W. Bush in 2004.

But there are peasants with pitchforks everywhere we turn these days.

If I were in the Obama camp, I would quit trying to sell the idea that the “change” he’s offering is generational, because, as I recently noted, the Clinton generation (of which I’m nominally a part) is not exactly ready to hand over the reins (and Obama’s tendency to talk like a punk doesn’t help matters).

But generational change is how some Dems are painting the “differences” between the Clinton and Obama camps—differences that are being elided as Obama “Moves to the Center,” claims Thomas Edsall in the HuffPo [e.a.]:

In the international relations policy arena, sources in and out of the Obama camp described a more subtle process taking place, as Obama is forced to decide which Clinton experts to add to the team, and at what level in the hierarchy.

“While there are exceptions on both sides, one of the key differences between the Clinton and Obama foreign policy gurus is generational. And this generational split has significant consequences,” one knowledgeable expert said, speaking on background. “In the main, the senior folks in the Clinton administration (1993-2001) went with Hillary, while many of the less senior people went with Obama.”

Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy advisers came of political age during the Cold War, in many cases during in the Carter administration, and tend to see the world in terms of states and state conflicts, this source said. In addition, many of Hillary Clinton’s top advisers “spent eight years dealing with Saddam [Hussein's] intransigence in the 90s,” making them more receptive to the arguments for invading Iraq.

Conversely, this expert argued, many of the Obama advisers are post-Cold War theorists who tend to see the world in terms of failed states, the influence of technology, food crises, non-state actors like Osama bin Laden, the spread of nuclear weapons, and the uneven distribution of the benefits of globalization.

Another way of seeing this “generational difference,” of course, is this: having experience (aka coming of political age is a form of experience, which the Clintonistas have) versus having smart-(ass) ideas (aka being post-Cold War “theorists”—which the Obamabots think they have).

Meanwhile, one prominent California family lives out a different kind of drama at home, where it’s not a left-sectarian fight but rather a GOP-vs-Dems debating (sorta) society:

Of all the supporters behind the two presumptive nominees for president this year, none are quite as intriguing as Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican who has thrown his support behind Senator John McCain, and the governor’s wife, Maria Shriver, a Democrat and vocal backer of Senator Barack Obama.

The lawn of their Brentwood home has dueling campaign signs. The breakfast table has become a casual debating society. Ms. Shriver is even threatening to bring a life-size cutout of her preferred candidate into the house, something the governor has seen her do in other elections. “When one of the candidates screws up,” Mr. Schwarzenegger said of the cutouts, “the kids carry them outside.”

And to my great relief, the Dem side in this battle is represented by a fair-minded person—a “little-d democrat” [e.a.]:

“I think there are great benefits to having kids grow up understanding that we do not live in a one-party system,” Ms. Shriver said. “That there are two ways at looking at an issue. To be patient, and to compromise, those are good lessons not just in politics but for life. I grew up believing there was only one way to think. There isn’t.”

All hail the friendly enmity between people with different politics!

I know they mean well, but earnest policy types really need to get their heads out of the clouds or out of their policy papers or out of their own rear ends and take a good hard look at the deeply inhospitable media terrain in which they operate.***

On Sunday, Michael Signer published a piece in the WaPo that was picked up by a bunch of bloggers, and which he followed up with a post on Democracy Arsenal. Upshot: the media ought to cover the candidates’ positions on foreign policy more than it does, because foreign policy is very important.

Well, duh. Everyone knows that.

What we don’t know is how to make that happen in a cultural moment and environment in which the news media has taken a sharp turn away from any kind of hard news coverage and when audiences seem to long for a 24/7 diet of sensationalized entertainment.

We no longer have time to argue about whether or not this is what they indeed long for. Even if audiences wanted enlightenment rather than distraction, the train has left the station. Network and cable news organizations no longer talk about offering the news as a public service; they brag about their audience numbers. (And media critics often join in the horse race coverage.)

Media and news executives long ago came to the conclusion that unless there is breaking hard news that threatens to interrupt life for our nation, what we the audience really want in the “news” is reality-based distraction: fluff, drama, conflict, horse-race coverage, consumer news we can use, crisis-management advice, and stirred emotions. (It’s true that if it bleeds it leads, but we don’t want a diet too high in blood and guts.)

On this blog, I have spent two years elaborating the thesis that the most effective way for the “push” visual media (TV networks and cable channels) to reach a vast, diverse population (and electorate) under the current cultural conditions (which coincide with a time in the evolution of media when we’ve changed from a mass audience into a “mass of niches” audience) is through an effective combination of information and entertainment: infotainment. (Soft news works to get across some kind of information to “low-information” voters; the scholar Matthew Baum has written a book about it and continues to do research in this area.)

My suggestion is simple: Go with the flow. Don’t fight the trend against hard news.

Improve the quality and the information density of soft news. 

Whether your goal (like Signer’s) is to keep people informed about the foreign-policy issues that might affect them or your mission is to get more people interested in the wider world beyond their immediate environment (which is my obsession: it drives me crazy that Americans are so ignorant), it is long past time to stop criticizing the media for what it doesn’t do.

It is time to find effective ways to use the media—or to create your own media channels—to get people to pay attention to your cause.

I’m not saying this is the optimum situation. I would certainly love a more seriously informed electorate. Absent that likelihood (throughout history, most people have been ill informed; there’s no reason to believe that our generation is any different—who doesn’t love recess more than school?), it would be much more productive to work with what we have. And make it better for everyone.

——————

*** Here are some questions for Beltway-and-beyond policy wonks: Have any of you—especially those of you who sit in front of a computer monitor all day long—taken a look at TV lately? at what TV calls the “news”?

Have you watched Charlie Gibson or Katie Couric or Brian Williams for a week? Have you caught one of Keith Olbermann’s Special Moments of Stupidity? Have you listened to Bill O’Reilly rant and rave? Have you glimpsed Larry King puffing up Rudy Giuliani one day and Michelle Obama the next? Have you seen the “ladies” on The View go at it over politics? Have you tuned in to Stephen Colbert, Jay Leno, Jon Stewart, Jimmy Kimmel, David Letterman, or Conan O’Brian? to Oprah? Dr. Phil? Judge Judy? Regis and Kelly? Ellen?

I understand that it’s beneath you to watch a lot of this stuff, but this is what you’re competing against when you want to get “foreign-policy matters” in front of the American people.

Rather than cluelessly belabor the obvious, it would behoove you to understand that this is how passive, “low-information” Americans (those who depend on TV for their “news”) learn about “the issues.” This is the stuff people watch, when they’re not watching American Idol, Dancing with the Stars, etc.

Foreign policy matters—unless they are sensational or catastrophic—cannot possibly compete against this stuff. Instead, TV reduces every “issue” to a hysterical “he said, she said” debate and every public figure to a caricature.

That’s reality. We can’t wish it away. What those of us who care about foreign policy issues should do is learn how to operate effectively in this environment.

I’m not suggesting it will be easy. But if Barack Obama can get and hold people’s attention, maybe there’s hope.

One of Glenn Reynolds’s emailers describes Obama-swooners as your typical fans—wrestling fans, that is [e.a.]:

I am in medical school now, but I remember when I used to watch the WWF (WWE as it is called now) about 10 years ago and I have to say Obama’s victory/campaign speech tonight in Virginia is utterly reminiscent of any “face” (good guy) speech as he arrived in the ring in a new town.

“My it’s good to be back to (insert city/state)…I’ll tell you you guys have the best (insert sports team/governor)…” the speech then goes on about being an underdog and more importantly winning against the odds et cetera, et cetera. The best part about it is that the crowd in both instances, fake wrestling and politics, always screams and applauds in the same spots and eventually breaks into chanting the hero’s name. I understand this isn’t a speech meant to unveil any type of policy specifics (when are his speeches ever about that really?) but the similarities were striking for about five minutes.

Just a friendly reminder that depression usually follows mania.

Bush is certainly wasting no time in trying to burst the bubble:

“I certainly don’t know what he believes in. The only foreign policy thing I remember he said was he’s going to attack Pakistan and embrace Ahmadinejad,” Bush said.

Obama hit back, you’ll be happy to know.

“Of course President Bush would attack the one candidate in this race who opposed his disastrous war in Iraq from the start. But Barack Obama doesn’t need any foreign policy advice from the architect of the worst foreign policy decision in a generation,” said Obama spokesman Bill Burton.

He’ll need something better than Kos and Pelosi talking points, though.

Whoever thought up and produced this Obama video is a PRopaganda^TMgenius. Not that the under-30 set isn’t entirely in Obama’s corner anyway, but this pretty much seals the deal in terms of putting Obama in the territory of “hip.”***

Though the effectiveness of the message-delivery system can’t be disputed, there is an obvious weakness in this kind of campaigning—and this kind of candidate—as Jeff Jarvis points out: It’s all rhetoric.

To me, this only underscores the notion that Obama’s campaign is the most rhetorical of the bunch: speeches and slogans so neat they can fit in 4/4 time.

I agree. The Obama campaign more and more begins to resemble a celebrity marketing campaign, as I mentioned here:

The way Barack Obama is being covered by the media and the blogosphere, he’s not a political candidate anymore—he’s a celebrity. He doesn’t have political followers—he’s got fans. He doesn’t have a political platform—he’s got a one-word slogan—”change” [which works, ’cause “change is good,” just like Nissan says, right?]. He makes narcissists feel so good about themselves.

So: the slogan has changed—now it’s “Yes, we can”—but the marketing pitch is the same: Obama’s the one.

Howard Kurtz tried to burst this bubble on Reliable Sources this morning [e.a.]:

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
HOWARD KURTZ, HOST (voice over): Conjuring Camelot. The media gets swept away over Ted Kennedy’s endorsement of Barack Obama. Are journalists promoting the rookie senator as the next JFK? …

KURTZ: The presidential campaign is a blur now, all sound bites and snippets, a 22-state dash to Super Tuesday just two days from now. John McCain has been boosted by winning Florida, by the backing of his formal rival, Rudy Giuliani, and by favorable coverage from the reporters he talked to for hours every day.

Hillary Clinton claimed victory in Florida, a beauty contest where no Democrats campaigned because of the a dispute within the party, but the press wasn’t buying her spin.

And Barack Obama, well, the pundits have been comparing him to JFK since he first started flirting with running. And when Ted Kennedy and Carolina Kennedy endorsed him this week, the media somehow magically transported us to this moment in 1961. …

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JOHN F. KENNEDY, FMR. PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Let the word go forth from this time and place — to friend and foe alike — that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans. (END VIDEO CLIP)

KURTZ: Every anchor and correspondent, it seemed, picked up that metaphor and ran with it.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BRIAN WILLIAMS, NBC NEWS: On the broadcast tonight from Washington, passing the torch.

KATIE COURIC, CBS NEWS: Tonight, passing the torch.

CHRIS MATTHEWS, MSNBC: The torch gets passed, the Clintons get passed by.

WOLF BLITZER, CNN ANCHOR: Barack Obama touched by the legacy of Camelot.

HARRY SMITH, CBS NEWS: Ted and Caroline set to hit the campaign trail after they announced the heir to Camelot.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KURTZ: Why have the media gone haywire over this Kennedy endorsement?

The consensus of Kurtz’s panel? Because it makes for a great story. (regardless of what it means, if anything).

The media is all about storytelling. It is not about “the news.” Infotainment rules.

Beyond that: you can’t burst a successful PRopaganda^TM gambit with a lot of words. The only way to beat it is to create an even bigger, better, and eye-catching one.

The campaign ‘08 Battle of Iconography goes on.

————-

*** “He’s got soul,” said one of my son’s friends. Being New Yorkers, with everything that’s entailed (that is: living in a bubble of harmony and tolerance … especially now that Giuliani is no longer our mayor), my (young adult) kids and their friends don’t form a representative sample of youth, of course. But they serve as a bellwether of the attitude of their generation.

They feel betrayed. They feel that they were lied to. They want a reason to believe.

Obama is now officially the morally superior candidate:

Lawyers for Gitmo detainees endorse Obama

The attorneys said in a joint statement that they believed Obama was the best choice to roll back the Bush-Cheney administration’s detention policies in the war on terrorism and thereby to “restore the rule of law, demonstrate our commitment to human rights, and repair our reputation in the world community.” The attorneys are representing the detainees in habeas corpus lawsuits, which are efforts to get individual hearings before federal judges in order to challenge the basis for their indefinite imprisonment without trial.

Mitt Romney, of course, is the guy who wants to double Guantanamo.

And Mike Huckabee thinks Guantanamo is way nicer than prisons in Arkansas.

It should be a very, very interesting campaign—once we get the nominations over with. But I’m in no rush.

This is by far the best election campaign I’ve ever witnessed: totally engaging infotainment.

I can’t help it if I’m a close reader, okay? So after I read Matthew Yglesias’s disapproving post about Hillary rushing to her feet at the SOTU to applaud Bush’s line about the terrorists knowing that the surge had worked, I went and clicked on the link he provided and read the whole piece.

And, lo and behold, what did I find? That Yglesias’s man Barack Obama went wild at the SOTU last night when Bush put Iran on notice:

When Bush warned the Iranian government that “America will confront those who threaten our troops, we will stand by our allies, and we will defend our vital interests in the Persian Gulf” Obama jumped up to applaud. Clinton leaned across Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.), seated to her left, to look in Obama’s direction before slowly standing.

I long ago stopped trying to post any responses over at Yglesias’s place, because if he reads them, he gives no indication of having done so and rarely, if ever, responds—not very blogger-like. But I note that others continue the effort to address Yglesias’s points, as if they are worth discussion.

One commenter brought my point to his attention [e.a.]:

I agree with Steven this is pretty clear evidence HRC is just hawkish by nature, and that’s a good enough reason to not give your vote to her.

But can someone tell me what to make of this?

When Bush warned the Iranian government that “America will confront those who threaten our troops, we will stand by our allies, and we will defend our vital interests in the Persian Gulf” Obama jumped up to applaud. Clinton leaned across Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.), seated to her left, to look in Obama’s direction before slowly standing.

The Illinois senator strongly criticized the former first lady last year when she supported a resolution calling for Iran’s Revolutionary Guard to be designated a terrorist organization. Obama supporters and other Democrats charged the vote would give Bush political cover to begin military operations against Iran.

Wouldn’t Obama’s criticism of the Kyl-Leiberman bill mean he shouldn’t stand up here? And didn’t he give that vote a pass in any case? Does not compute.

Posted by plum | January 29, 2008 10:01 AM

A couple of points: Mr. Obama’s fans don’t seem to care much about what he stands for—even if it includes a strong and aggressive national defense—as long as he doesn’t make much noise about it or as long as he doesn’t use threatening language or as long as he doesn’t seem (on the surface) to relish combat the way Hillary Clinton does.

I find that weird, but maybe not so weird. (More about this social/societal/cultural phenomenon another time.)

The other point that becomes obvious when you read the Hill piece that Yglesias linked to is that there is a huge dividing line among the Democrats—a fight for the soul of the Democratic party, is how Ron Silver put it long ago—between mostly young militant peaceniks and battle-hardened and beaten-up-by-reality liberals.

But it also seems to be about those who accept reality and those who are wary of Wag the Dog scenarios and Gulf of Tonkin lies, as this commenter at Yglesias’s place suggests [e.a.]:

The difference [between Hillary and Obama] is between those who have been tricked into thinking that Iraq has something to do with terrorism and those who understand that Iraq is an allegory for the American domestic factional struggle.

DIVIDED WE FALL.

Posted by Frank Wilhoit | January 29, 2008 9:26 AM

That makes both this election and what comes afterward very, very interesting—to me at least: the culture war (which is what we argue over when we argue over the Iraq war) is still on. Full force. It certainly won’t end with Bush, or with Clinton, or with McCain.

Nor would it end with Obama, however. But I’ll let the dreamers dream.

I’ve been too busy to do be my usual news-junkie self lately. Plus, ’tis the season to be jolly, and all “news” leads to mud-slinging, which is not my cuppa, so I’m not paying attention. And no late-night TV makes it much easier to avoid.

I was wondering, though: if Stewart and Colbert and Leno and Letterman aren’t there to process and massage political “news” for their audiences–which, after all, are comprised of voters (and demographically desirable ones), what’s the effect of the strike on events on the ground?

Tom Maustad of the Dallas Morning News says that the strike is “cultural buzz kill.” Moreover, one of his interviewees says, the strongest effect is on the culture, not on the candidates.

“[T]his has definitely had the effect of pretty much deleting politics from pop culture,” says Rich Hanley, communications professor at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut. …

“Campaigns are great for comedy, that’s for sure,” Hanley says. “But the funny thing is, the strikes keep going, the campaigns keep going and there’s no breakdown, no crisis. If anything, I think the strike is showing how irrelevant, or at least disposable, this type of programming really is.”

So, yeah: obviously, the strike is bad news for those who deliver (and profit from) the “culture.” But Travis Daub suggests  the strike might also affects the candidates, in unexpected ways:

This year, fewer people will watch campaign ads

More people will watch the debates

No 24

No Leno or Letterman

No “Indecision 2008,” or Saturday Night Live takedowns of the candidates

Voters might be better informed

Bottom line, says Daub:

Taking TV out of the election will probably be a great equalizer. Suddenly, the ad dollars spent on Iowa and New Hampshire airtime are less valuable, and the underdogs have a chance to harness the Internet, the debates and other nontraditional outlets to get their messages across.

So what’s a campaign media strategist to do? Take advantage of other, nontraditional broadcasts where your candidate could be featured. Expect more candidates popping up at sporting events, on daytime talk shows, or even on the reality circuit. Will Mike Huckabee do a guest appearance on the Biggest Loser? We can only hope.

More from Daub here in an interview.

I find it pretty interesting that the candidates’ campaigns (and the observers of the phenomenon of the writers’ strike) don’t even pay lip service to the role of the traditional outlet for getting candidates’ messages out—namely, “the news.”

What’s the MSM, chopped liver? And if so, could it be because the broadcast arm of the MSM now contains hardly any traditional–i.e., “straight” news—outlets? because, well, infotainment (i.e., narrative-driven information dissemination) rules?