The Kicker

The media jab Clinton’s metaphor

There’s much chatter today that Chelsea Clinton, while headlining a North Carolina State campaign event for her mother, was once again asked about l’affaire Lewinsky and how it affects her mother’s candidacy. And once again, she briskly dismissed the questioner. But (sorry Chelsea!) the door’s been opened. So whichever lucky interviewer (Matt Lauer? Barbara Walters?) […]

In case you haven’t had enough Ongoing Democratic Primary: Who Benefits and Who Is Damaged analyses, here is the lede from the Associated Press’ contribution: John McCain’s standing in the presidential race grows stronger each day as he benefits from the increasingly personal and extraordinarily protracted Democratic nomination fight between Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack […]

It’s on! The media’s hunt to locate – and coin a snappy moniker for—2008’s must-get swing vote (that subset of the population who, by dint of sharing a single trait, might be counted on to vote monolithically and therefore swing the election to their chosen candidate.) Election 2004 saw, among others, Strip Club Dads, Hook […]

A.k.a., campaigning

We don’t mean to pick on Lesley Stahl, in particular, but that Al Gore piece last night on 60 Minutes was pretty much content-free, as far as I could tell. “There’s still a lot of skepticism about whether global warming is man made,” Stahl remarked. “I don’t think there’s a lot. I think there’s…” Gore […]

Said Andrea Mitchell on NBC’s Today Show this morning, reporting on the protracted Democratic primary: Critics blame [Howard] Dean for creating the calendar and rules that led to the Michigan and Florida debacle, and they say his inability to broker a deal stems partly from his own weakness as a politician. And what clip do […]

This would have to be rather high on the list of corrections an editor would really rather not have to run: An article on March 16 profiling three sex workers in the wake of Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s resignation after revelations that he patronized prostitutes misconstrued how two of the women, identified by the pseudonyms Faith […]