Iran is going nuclear. Europe is melting down financially and politically, with the prime ministers of Greece and Italy resigning within days of each other. The White House chief of staff just got demoted.
But the journalists who populate America’s newsrooms were interested on Monday and Tuesday in one thing and one thing only: Did a man who is not now and was never going to be president grope a woman in a car 15 years ago?
I know this from Twitter. One reason to spend some time on Twitter every day is that it gives you an invaluable road map to what the reporters and pundits and editors who set the national news agenda are thinking about, minute by minute.
When an issue grabs hold of the media in a really dramatic way during the day, you can watch it happen in real time; Reporter A will Tweet a fact, Reporter B will respond to said fact, Pundit C will offer a quick opinion of what Reporter B said, and we’re off to the races.
Given the fact that a Tweet runs only 140 characters — about as long as this sentence is now — the thoughts and opinions do not run deep. What makes an impression is the intensity with which a subject is discussed, as evidenced by the sheer number of Tweets on it.
Based on that, it is clear that no political subject in the past few months has caught the fancy of the press corps quite like Herman Cain’s alleged mistreatment of women two decades past.
The tweets broke down into three categories.
l There were the shocked-outraged-worried-concerned ones. Most of these assumed the truth of the charges immediately following the vague Politico story with an unnamed accuser issuing vague allegations.
l There were the political-strategy ones, all of which centered on what Cain should or needed or could do to minimize the damage. At first, though, there appeared to be no damage, at least according to the Cain campaign, which claimed the attacks had caused a fund-raising bonanza.
The problem with these strategic thoughts is that they came smack dab up against the stark reality of the Cain campaign, which is that he has no strategy for winning, no coherent path to the nomination and no idea how to manage himself now that he has emerged in the top tier.
* And then there were the jokes and puns and jibes.
You can’t underestimate the attraction of Twitter to people like me who’ll always wonder whether we should have tried stand-up comedy earlier in our careers. A Tweet is basically a one-liner. “Take my wife — please” was a Tweet half a century before Twitter’s creators were even born. There’s nothing like the intersection of politics and sex to get the satirical juices flowing.
What’s remarkable about all this is that it both reflects and intensifies the nature of the media coverage during the day. It’s a giant echo chamber. Twitter intensity indicates to journalists (who tend to follow other journalists) that the story is hot, and that they’re right to keep covering it relentlessly.
The overall effect, though, is bizarre. Surely the biggest political story yesterday wasn’t Cain’s groping but rather the exposure of profound turmoil inside the Obama White House.
Ordinarily, the press would be going wild about the partial defenestration of William Daley, and rightly so. The White House chief of staff is the most important managerial post in our politics, and the president’s evident decision to let Daley go is an admission that whatever he’s been doing over the past year isn’t working and he wants to go in a different direction.
Daley reportedly represented a relatively moderate voice. We ought to be reading about what his demotion means — in other words, will the president of the United States now be shifting markedly and nakedly left?
No, there’s no time for that sort of thing now. Someone is talking about something that happened back when people were using Netscape to go to that peerless search engine — Altavista.
