THERE'LL BE SOME SUBSTANCE ANY MINUTE NOW, REALLY

In today's column, Frank Rich makes a more persuasive case for optimism about the Democrats' chances than I would have expected -- no, Frank, I admit I didn't pay much attention to the 200,000+ Pennsylvania Republicans who still aren't with the program and therefore cast votes for Ron Paul or Mike Huckabee in the state's GOP primary (and who thus may not vote for McCain in the fall), and, yes, it's good to be reminded of what Ross Douthat of The Atlantic has noted, that McCain can't seem to get past 45% in polling of head-to-head matchups with named Democrats.

But this doesn't impress me:

Mr. McCain ... must show he can think and speak fluently about the domestic issues that are gripping the country. Picture him debating either Democrat about health care, the mortgage crisis, stagnant middle-class wages, rice rationing at Costco. It's not pretty.

Real issues? In a debate? You're joking, right, Frank?

You obvious didn't get the memo. Debates aren't about issues -- they're about whatever non-issue campaign spinners have succeeded in making the Distraction Du Jour concerning whichever candidate (I should probably say whichever Democratic candidate, because this doesn't seem to apply to Republicans) has been designated by the media this week to play the goat. Last fall the goat was Hillary Clinton and the issue was driver's licenses for undocumented aliens; now it's Obama and flag pins. By the fall it will be something else. It won't be the war or the economy.

A round of appluase to Elizabeth Edwards for noting the sorry state of the political press in a terrific op-ed, also in The New York Times.

... every analysis that is shortened, every corner that is cut, moves us further away from the truth until what is left is the Cliffs Notes of the news, or what I call strobe-light journalism, in which the outlines are accurate enough but we cannot really see the whole picture.

...Did you, for example, ever know a single fact about Joe Biden's health care plan? Anything at all? But let me guess, you know Barack Obama's bowling score. We are choosing a president, the next leader of the free world. We are not buying soap, and we are not choosing a court clerk with primarily administrative duties.

What's more, the news media cut candidates like Joe Biden out of the process even before they got started.

... Indeed, the Biden campaign was covered more for its missteps than anything else. Chris Dodd, also a serious candidate with a distinguished record, received much the same treatment. I suspect that there was more coverage of the burglary at his campaign office in Hartford than of any other single event during his run other than his entering and leaving the campaign....

In the print Times, this op-ed appears on the same page as Maureen Dowd's latest column -- and in a just world, the very presence of the Edwards column would make Dowd's column crawl off the page in shame. But that's not to be. Dowd is the proud embodiment of everything Elizabeth Edwards quite rightly despises:

...The Nixonian Hillary has a ravenous hunger that Obama lacks. Literally -- at a birthday party in Philly for her photographer, she was devouring the chips and dip with two hands -- and viscerally.

At Joe's Junction gas station in Indianapolis, Obama did his best to shoo away the pesky elitist label. Accused by an Indianapolis reporter of looking like a GQ cover, he said he has only four pairs of shoes and buys "five of the same suit and then I patch them up and wear them repeatedly." But his campaign refused to reveal the brand, presumably because it's not J. C. Penney....

ARGH!!! I DON'T CARE! I DON'T CARE!

But, much as I admire Elizabeth Edwards for dreaming of the possibility that this idiotic trivia can be deemphasized, I don't expect that day ever to come.

But can we at least have a single standard? If you're going to ask about freaking flag pins, can we at least ascertain whether every candidate wears one, or whether the media louts who press the issue do? If Obama is unworthy of our vote because he doesn't buy his suits at Penney's, can we at least be told where the extraordinarily wealthy John McCain buys his?

We lefties have long talked about "the Clinton rules" -- the fact that one or both Clintons are regularly criticized for things they say and do that aren't considered objectionable from other politicians. Well, we're now getting "the Obama rules." And I'm not singling out Obama -- if John Edwards were the nominee (or, say, Joe Biden or Chris Dodd), I'm sure we'd now have the Edwards/Biden/Dodd rules. If we can't de-trivialize our press, can't we at least be equitably trivial?