The Kicker

When Larry King randomly announced

Sen. Barack Obama appeared last night, yes, on nearly every major channel in prime time, but also on The Daily Show (“not a swing show, if you will,” per Jon Stewart) where he worked in a little dig at Fox News. STEWART: So much of this has been about fear of you…Do you think any […]

Friedman on Iran and transliteration

Kid reporter Damon Weaver (taking a break from his day job as a student at Kathryn E. Cunningham/Canal Point Elementary School) turns in this dispatch from a Biden campaign rally. The apex of cuteness comes when Weaver’s arms get tired from holding the mic as high as he can to interview Biden. Or maybe it’s […]

Yesterday, Jack Shafer explained why covering an Obama victory might be very hard for our political reporters: If Obama wins, these scribes know that they’ll be facing the toughest assignment of their careers. They’ve all oversubscribed to the notion that Obama’s candidacy is momentous, without parallel, and earth-shattering, so they can’t file garden-variety pieces about […]

…The New York Times! For the below no-it’s-not-a-typo little gem, currently gracing the paper’s homepage:

Back in August, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews decided that Steve Schmidt of the McCain campaign: Reminds me of Sergeant Markoff in Beau Geste, the guy who was kicked out of the Siberian army for cruelty. We‘ll be right back with the round table with more of the politics fix. You‘re watching Hardball, where you get movie […]

Fox News has been for several minutes following a car chase live in Miami. Ditto, MSNBC (“That is not even a lane!” Thanks, Contessa Brewer). CNN appears to be sticking with an Obama speech happening in Raleigh, N.C.

FRONTLINE’s “The War Briefing” (maybe you saw it on PBS last night?) was all the talk of our morning news meeting just now. A great example of “anti-pack” reporting (going where everyone else is not… and, literally going, in this case to “the deadliest battlefield in the mountains of Afghanistan,” “the militant safe havens deep […]

Last night on Fresh Air, Jonah Goldman of the National Campaign for Fair Elections offered a not-so-new, not-so-radical, duh-in-a-good-way idea about how reduce voter registration fraud: Universal registration for all citizens. There is no reason why we have to leave it to these community groups to do a lot of the great work that they […]

There is something very appealing right now about the idea of a “time out” from campaign coverage. And the idea that this period of quiet reflection for voters prior to November 4, “without media interference,” might be achieved simply by the local paper ceasing political coverage during this time is also appealing (Chris Matthews, poli-bloggers, […]

The 2008 debates were “hideously bungled by the Commission on Presidential Debates, a wholly owned subsidiary of the successful campaigns,” writes Cynthia Stead, a Massachusetts State Republican Committeewoman, in a Cape Cod Times column arguing that the League of Women Voters should once again take charge of presidential and VP debates (h/t Eric Boehlert). And […]

Today, in lieu of her standard column (and column font) in the New York Times, we get a “screenplay by Maureen Dowd” — the “revised third draft.” While I can’t see a studio stampede to greenlight this thing, I’d give the green light to Dowd’s continuing to tell column readers, right up top, which “draft” […]

Politico‘s Mike Allen writes up an email from the Obama campaign, cataloging a raft of October fundraisers that trade access for cash. Give $500, and get a private reception with House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank. Give $10,000 and you can have dinner with Tony Lake, Dennis Ross and Dan Shapiro, three members of […]

Politico’s Jim VandeHei and John F. Harris take readers through political journalists’ biases (the ones that “matter so much more” than “ideological bias”) and how they, and some of the particulars of this campaign, have redounded mostly to Obama’s benefit. One example: Obama has benefited from his ability to minimize internal drama and maximize secrecy […]