Cahiers du politique

As the proverbial Curtain has been raised -- officially, it can now be said -- on the 2008 presidential race, a line from Sidney Blumenthal's self-serving but otherwise excellent book, The Clinton Wars, crept back into my head: "Politics could be written about like a movie review, a movie review like politics." Blumenthal was discussing his foray into the alt.newspaper scene in Boston during the early '70s, but he was presaging (inadvertently?) the commingling of Politics and Entertainment in America. The apogee of this development -- if you prefer to think of it as a good thing -- arrived on newsstands and in subscribers' mailboxes in the glossy form of George magazine, the brainchild of JFK Jr.

But put that thought aside for a minute, and think about "politics" and "story" in a deeper way. I'll pick this up in my next post.