GIVE ME THAT OLD-TIME CROLYISM. The weekend's reading (on-train,) is Jack Germond's Fat Man Fed Up, subtitled "How American Politics Went Bad" (details or compare prices.) There is enough stuff in each chapter to be grist for a series of essays (perhaps as the term unfolds, I do want readers coming back regularly.) For now, a couple of major themes. At the start of chapter 5, "A Confessed Liberal," Mr Germond writes,

When someone, usually a suspicious conservative, asks me if it isn't true that most reporters are liberals, I confess: Sure they are. So what?

The chapter goes on to note that such denials are counterproductive, and the material in that chapter is stuff for one of those later essays. Mr Germond provides his one rebuttal to the "so what?" in chapter 9, "Sound and Fury, Signifying a Gotcha!" He has the origins of the 1976 flap over future President James E. Carter's "ethnic purity" statement. That went from a yawn to a gaffe to a flap only after the following events transpired.

But a CBS News editor, obviously hypersensitive to violations of political correctness even before the term was invented, [c.q. -- it originated amongst over-earnest lefties in the late 1960s and entered the popular lexicon around 1990] spotted what he decided was an offending phrase, "ethnic purity." He alerted a CBS reporter, who quickly questioned Carter about it at a press conference the following day, a public enough occasion to put the "issue" into the public domain and the pack of reporters on the case.

Let me guess what else happened in the newsroom. The editor's colleagues were all just as hypersensitive: nobody -- particularly Nobody In Authority -- took occasion to say "let's research this first" or, "cool it" ("get a life" not yet being in the lexicon.) Likewise, the reporter knew only the racismsexismhomophobia template (these concepts were around in those days) and likely didn't have any colleagues that might interpret the world differently. The root cause of the "gotcha" journalism is the group-think of the journos, it's the old "How could Reagan win, I don't know anybody who voted for him?" all over again.

Mr Germond's primary gripe with politics has to do with the choice of the president. Consider his characterization of the senior President Bush: "He wanted the office and the title as a vindication of his public career but not as an opportunity to improve the lives of his fellow citizens." Granted, there are many people who see the national government as a facilitator of improvements and the president as advocate-in-chief for programs that achieve those improvements. Not everybody sees things that way. Mr Germond also doesn't like the influences of money and of interest groups -- his personal demon is Protestant fundamentalism -- on elections. The problem, as I intend to spell out in greater detail over the next few weeks, is that if the national government is to be the facilitator, that is where the interest groups are going to get involved. Perhaps a little less vision and a little less activist government will take away the incentives to buy influence.

SECOND SECTION. Check out this Instapundit alternative-campaign scenario. Nothing close in Mr Germond's book (which, not surprisingly, offers precisely no mention of Internet sources.)