I don't mean by that to find any fault with former President Clinton who delivered a masterly lesson to people across the political spectrum. Afterward, he was factchecked by all manner of Politifact, etc.... and anyone with a brain scored him highly.
So why is he not heard from until Thursday night, i.e. tonight, on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. There are commenters who point out the activity they've seen or know about and that's terrific, but then I live in a Connecticut where we're too blue to draw Presidential money this year. But, seriously, I love the rapid response and despise the media neglect.
More, but not a lot below the fold.
I understand the media pressure, but this is the first time in the two weeks, one day, when he blew the Democratic Convention away with an articulation not only of what was good about President Obama's policy, but the simple bad arithmetic of the opposition.
Before shifting off to his Global Initiative, Clinton in relatively few words explained what he was trying to do in that speech, how much preparation went into it -- and perhaps most importantly the attitude he tried to strike in delivering a simple explanatory speech without talking down about our current situation.
It was in a small way an equivalent to the speech he delivered on the big stage. I've been struck time and again about how many serious people show up for interviews with Jon Stewart, including people like Lynn Cheney (not sure about the serious for her).
He usually treats people gently and extracts from them the sort of information that damns them or elevates them. He did exactly that with Clinton. But here's my all too obvious question.
I haven't seen anything of consequence that was original since Clinton made the speech. Oh, I've read a shitload of pontificating and diversions along the path of the horse race. What I haven't seen is the focus on facts, the direct approach to real issues as opposed to imagined issues. I keep seeing mindless "news releases" -- far more worse from the Romney people just because they're stupid and false. But that takes me down the path that Clinton did not want to go.
So why are people still pontificating about horses hit -- and I haven't seen anyone interview Clinton about the actual pragmatic issues of the campaign. I could have missed it. But I think the core problem is that anything that goes too much to the facts, to the Republican lie about the deficit, about the lack of evidence for their crackpot ideas, just comes to close to reality for the beltway scribes.
So, to cite Krugman and Brad DeLong, why oh why can't we have a better news media. This is bordering on criminal irresponsibility.