by Lisa Van Dusen | Wednesday, 29 October, 2008A friend sent me a link the other night to a video called Bridges for Obama, a montage of Obama supporters on different bridges around the world, set to an R&B anthem written for the candidate.
Watching these people in Cairo and Cambridge and Vancouver, it was hard not to feel for John McCain, ending his career as this guy's opponent; a fate that could actually wear worse on him if he somehow squeaks out an upset than if he loses.
As the campaign careens through its final week of crackpot Marxist slurs and last-minute handgun hoarding, one of the topics of premature post-game analysis is pro-Obama media bias.
(My disclosure: I volunteered for the Obama campaign before starting this column.)
For civilians, there are politicians you vote for and there are politicians you 'fall in love with' (in American terms, both John and Robert Kennedy, Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan).
Given the right, rare confluence of talent, ability and history, journalists aren't immune to those distinctions.
Falling in political love isn't like falling in the other kind, though they can both represent a triumph of hope over experience; a process even more discombobulating for people who start out necessarily cynical and hard to impress.
In Thurston Clarke's book about Bobby Kennedy's fateful bid for the Democratic nomination in 1968, The Last Campaign, Tom Wicker of the New York Times called Kennedy, 'an easy man to fall in love with, and too many people did.'
Richard Harwood of the Washington Post asked to be taken off the Kennedy campaign because, he told his editors, "I'm falling in love with the guy" and could no longer be objective.
Political reporters develop a herculean tolerance for BS based on prolonged exposure. Otherwise, they couldn't do the job.
But once in a very long while, someone takes the stage (that's the polit-love version of a Barry Manilow opening) who jerks us out of that blah-blah-blah reverie, to quote John McCain.
It could be that some of the best journalists in the United States at the time fell in love with Bobby Kennedy because his role in the Shakespearean tightrope act of fulfilling his brother's destiny without repeating it, defied objectivity in the same way Obama's promise as the first African-American and first post 9/11 president does now.
Maybe he also had more in common with reporters than Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon or Hubert Humphrey.
Obama, too, seems like a guy who might have been a journalist if he hadn't been so smart.
In Clarke's account of that last campaign, he quotes Life magazine columnist Loudon Wainwright describing a more visceral source of bias on the Kennedy bus: Protectiveness.
The reporters, wrote Wainwright, were 'concerned to the point of anxiety about his safety.'
If one gut check for bias is being too invested in an outcome, you can see how stakes like those might shift the calculus.
Obama's run has shifted the usual protocols to the point where Republicans are now scrambling to endorse him.
In fact, in a different scenario, it wouldn't be hard to imagine McCain, the anti-Republican Republican, doing the same.
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