The View from the Couch: Town Halling

Summer's slowing down most everything political, so much so that we're lost in town hall mania, John McCain style. He wants one held most every week, with Barack Obama in attendance, so the old war hero can poke fun at mister smarty pants. And Ronald Reagan's widow has just announced that her husband's library out in a lovely part of California is available as a setting anytime it's needed. Obama's people are a little reluctant to get involved is this love fest of highly managed citizen participation. Way back when, when Joe McGinniss wrote The Selling of the President 1968, these staged formats were Richard Nixon's favorite. But everyone wants a break, a vacation, from campaigning; indeed, exhaustion is being given as a reason that Obama chose Jim Johnson for his veep screening team, now that Johnson has bailed out, given the bad publicity he generated just for being who he is. (My mention of him last week was doubtless the last straw.) McCain has been losing people for months after their biographies are made public; usually it's the long list of lobbying efforts trailing them being the cause to jump. In Obama's case, one commentator on Diane Rehm's Friday news roundup show expressed disbelief that Obama, being a Harvard Law School graduate, didn't have a trusted brilliant lawyer friend to name to his veep committee. She didn't seem to recollect that Bill Clinton and his wife, Hillary, Yale Law School graduates, had the same problem when they hit town and moved into the White House. It's hard to gain trusted friends when you're accelerating through space so quickly. And some of Obama's Chicago friends were only showing up at the local political operator Tony Rezko's trial, including defendant Rezko himself. It's a problem with hitting the big time so soon. There's likely to be more betrayed friends than trusted friends.