Are the voters in Nevada a bunch of dummies?

The question was posed before the Supreme Court this week by Las Vegas attorney Dominic Gentile. He argued that the term limits question was not complex, and the voters understood quite well the initiative’s potential effect, regardless of technicalities now raised by the legislature, which wants term limits tossed.

Are voters in Nevada a bunch of dummies? The question lingers, extending beyond term limits or any other single issue, inviting contemplation of complex issues and uninformed citizens. Of government mechanisms so intricate they can’t be understood without hours of study. Of what voters want, versus what they get, and what they end up creating.

The term limits case serves nicely as an example of how simple concepts become complicated. The must-pass-twice requirement for constitutional amendments, intended to ensure deliberation, leaves a two-year hole for legal maneuvers that add layers of complication. The current challenge to term limits has its roots in a confusing bout of court activity that occurred between its first ballot victory and its second, two years later.

For a future source confusion, look at PISTOL, the oddly-named eminent domain initiative from 2006 that seemed conceptually straightforward. Nevada voters overwhelmingly approved it once, understanding well their own outrage at the notion that one citizen could benefit by enlisting the government to take property from another citizen.

Then the 2007 legislature set out to improve PISTOL before its 2008 appearance on the ballot. The PISTOL improvements exist now in statute. But wait, that’s not all. The legislature also passed a resolution – call it PISTOL Version 2 — to amend the constitution again. Version 2 will need a second legislative approval in 2009. Meanwhile PISTOL Version 1 could pass again in 2008.

Leaving aside whether PISTOL Version 1 needed improving – many believe it did – the whole mess has become stunningly complex.

Are Nevada’s voters a bunch of dummies? Or does the preceding make your head spin? Who could expect the average voter, busy with life’s daily details – jobs, kids, homework, volunteer work, etc – to untangle the mess that lurks beneath the straightforward question?

How about taxes? A recent example of tax complexity appeared on the 2006 ballot. AB 554 from the 2005 legislative session required voter approval to perform some taxation housekeeping. Did even half of the voters understand what this bewildering item was, much less why they were voting on it?

Look beyond the ballot, at Dillon’s rule. Not at whether home rule is desirable, but at whether its absence makes things confusing. Busy voters have to follow the progress of local issues from city hall to Carson City and back. Are the voters dummies if the reason for the trip isn’t immediately apparent?

And now, in Washoe County, here comes the mother of all complex issues. A recent proposal by investment firm Goldman Sachs to lease Truckee Meadows Water Authority assets is about to be vetted in public. Politicians find the possibility intriguing. The TMWA board, comprised of five politicians and two political appointees, voted 6-1 to explore it. The public seems to hate the idea, with generalized fear of privatization as the most-cited reason for knee-jerk aversion

There is layer-upon-layer of complexity to be peeled back in the proposed TMWA transaction. Analysis related to pricing, to employee compensation, to local control, to the structure of the entity. And there’s the ever-present, but never-discussed effect of monopoly.

TMWA was statutorily exempted from PUC oversight when the non-profit utility was created. Theoretically, if the voters don’t like the direction, they can take vengeance on the elected officials who sit on the board. We’ll see whether that’s well understood by the voters or the office holders. But as usual, whatever the outcome, Nevada voters don’t have the luxury of being dumb.

]]> http://reasonablereporter.wordpress.com/2008/07/18/nevada-voters-do-not-have-the-luxury-of-being-dumb/feed/ http://reasonablereporter.wordpress.com/2008/07/04/rush-limbaugh-big-money-and-marconis-old-medium/ http://reasonablereporter.wordpress.com/2008/07/04/rush-limbaugh-big-money-and-marconis-old-medium/#comments Fri, 04 Jul 2008 18:14:59 +0000 reasonablereporter http://reasonablereporter.wordpress.com/?p=63

Traditional media, recently declared dead, or at least critically ill in the face of new media’s rising commercial viability, has a pulse after all. Rush Limbaugh’s new contract is a 400 million dollar expression of confidence in traditional media, and such expressions of confidence have been rare in recent years.

But news of Rush Limbaugh’s record-breaking contract has been discussed less in terms of its business significance, which is enormous in the context of a shrinking pie for old media outlets, and more in terms of whether he, or anyone else, should earn so much money. Even a local conservative talk show host in the Limbaugh mode – which reveres capitalism and personal achievement — asked, “how much is enough?”

The Reasonable Reporter must disclose that she is part of the Limbaugh trickle-down economy, having been paid in Limbaugh dollars for at least half of what is becoming a lengthy radio career. It’s often said, and it’s not hyperbole, that Rush Limbaugh saved AM radio. For those in the newstalk arena, it’s not in dispute, and the dollars, if not the politics have flowed to all the personnel of the stations that carry the show, whether or not they appreciate the association. (Many do not appreciate it, and some are even embarrassed by it.)

This is not to say we’d all be flipping burgers if not for Rush. But lots of people have the jobs we have because of who and what he is, and because of what he fashioned from a product that was gasping for air in 1988, in the face of competition from… hmmm… a new medium that had at last realized its commercial viability. FM radio had matured, and after some years as a novelty, had become a mainstream medium, draining the ad dollars away from the AMs. Superior-sounding FM was the new preferred venue for music, effectively placing a pillow over the faces of the top-40 AM powerhouses that had driven the industry for more than two decades. AM radio had to be reinvented as a talk-intensive product.

It’s worth noting that AM radio had already reinvented itself once, becoming almost entirely music-focused – the iPod of its day for a youth market seeking cultural identity — after television stole radio’s place in the family’s living room, replacing it as the preferred venue for drama and comedy.

It may also be important to note that Rush himself often refers to the AM talk product, or at least his portion of it, as if it were not part of the traditional media. And while he’s probably correct from a content perspective, the delivery device is strictly old media.

That brings us to content, which is still king. Rush is discussed primarily in terms of his political persona. His success is partially attributed to his early years as a disc jockey, which gave him added dimension as an entertainer rather than just an analyst of current events. Both are important components of the man who is now a 400-million dollar phenomenon. But neither fully explains his success.

Rush Limbaugh’s success is built on instinct, and the Reasonable Reporter asserts that the conservative content initially mattered mostly because the time was right for it. As heartfelt as his politics might be, everything about the Rush Limbaugh empire points to his instinct for the right move at the right moment, and for pressing the advantage when he’s gotten it.

The instinct plays itself out in his daily execution of the material, irrespective of the politics. He could be discussing cake recipes, and he would still have to locate the bull’s eye, topically speaking.

The instinct is larger, though, than what he says and how he says it. The instinct is manifest in his syndication model, and in the many ways he’s extended the product, including the early embrace of newsletters and podcasting. The instinct is manifest not just in the what, but the when and how, and how much.

But listen to the public discussion, from callers to the lofty desk of C-Span’s “Washington Journal” to the local talk radio station.

Adoration: He’s wonderful and he deserves the money. Excoriation: He’s a horrible hate monger who’s divided the country and it’s appalling that he’s rewarded in this way. We love him. We hate him. But by and large, we fail to explain what he really is.

Traditional media is shrinking at an alarming rate as the new media mature. The layoffs and contract buyouts are in progress. The newspaper is tiny. It has no heft as it hits the porch. Network television relies almost entirely on low-budget mindlessness. The iPod is the new radio. Minus the people who produce radio.

And yet, as the audience fragments, and the advertising money scatters in new directions, AM radio fares generally better than its battered counterparts, and a 400 million-dollar gesture of confidence has been made. It’s confidence in Marconi’s old medium, but only indirectly.

Hillary Clinton has voiced some concerns about sexism in the media, and for a number of reasons, the Reasonable Reporter has been quick to brush them aside. That’s mostly because three semester units of women’s studies backfired badly – crushing the capacity to give special consideration to female suffering in any circumstance except actual childbirth.

In that class, women students were instructed on the first day of the semester to count off, one, two three, four, then to stand together in groups. Ones gathered in one corner of the room, and the twos in another, and so on.

“Three out of four of you have been sexually molested by someone you know,” we were told. “So whichever group you’re in, for the moment you can consider yourselves the lucky ones, and look at the other three groups. Statistically speaking, all of the women you see outside your group have been sexually victimized.”

As it turns out, sexual victimization takes many forms, and if your brother brushed your buttocks with a can of Pringles while the two of you helped mom unload groceries in a tight pantry, that counts.

A full semester of this brand of nonsense was very clarifying, even at age nineteen. And so the Reasonable Reporter was startled all these years later to find herself doing victim math as Michelle Obama visited The View, where the five female hosts and the guest added up to a disquieting six. That means one “lucky one,” and a fractional remainder of a lucky one.

Good God, where did that come from? But this show, its success and its apparent importance to the presidential race – even peripherally — is difficult to fathom in the same way that class was difficult to fathom.

Aside from Whoopi Goldberg and Barbara Walters, the Reasonable Reporter can’t name all five female hosts of The View. But here’s what they talked about with the prospective First Lady of the United States:

1) Diversity- Whoopi notes that every black woman she sees on television has gold teeth and can’t speak in complete sentences. Wonder how she missed Gwen Iffel and Condi Rice and Oprah all these years. And oh yes, there’s Whoopi herself, and unidentifiable View co-host number three, both black. And Mrs. Obama, who’s getting a lot of coverage. There are six regularly televised articulate black women, right there, with no gold teeth.

Formal diversity training isn’t as effective says Mrs. Obama, as conversations like this, where we discuss things like…

2) Pantyhose. Barbara Walters is on the fence about whether or not to wear pantyhose. Out of respect for Michelle Obama, she wore them today. But Michelle Obama threw Barbara a curve. She didn’t wear any pantyhose, because she’s five-foot-eleven, and she finds them uncomfortable.

3) Inevitably, kids and husbands came up. Barack Obama no longer takes out the garbage. Unidentifiable View co-host number two, the blonde, has a child with food allergies, and she makes a food chart for her husband to follow when he has daddy duties and she’s not at home. (Viewers are treated to a shot of the chart, which resembles a NASA flight plan.)

4) They brush lightly against politics. Ever so lightly. Unidentifiable blonde co-host is also an apparent political conservative, but she and Mrs. Obama go out of their way to convey that they can disagree on issues and still be nice to each other. No actual viewpoints are exchanged.

5) Well-toned arms. Mrs. Obama has revived sleeveless dresses, and by the way, she is often compared favorably to Jackie Kennedy.

6) Whether Mrs. Obama is proud of her country. Whoopi plays the offending first-time-I’m-proud-of-my-country sound bite, and provides analysis of the vocal emphasis. It was the first time Mrs. Obama was really proud, says Whoopi, not the first time she was proud.

7) Strong women. People aren’t used to strong women. We don’t know how to talk about strong women. Speaking of strong women, Hillary suffered sexism, says the prospective First Lady, for the sake of Michelle Obama’s daughters.

There was more, but it began to sound all distorted and far away, like an odd dream. Like a dream about the presidential primary debates during the umpteenth month of debating. The Reasonable Reporter found herself yearning for the sound of Hillary, uttering a tortured string of hedge phrases.

(Remember the Hillary sentences that made you want to gouge out your eyes with knitting needles? They sounded something like this: “We’ll begin to take steps toward taking a look at what can be done to move in that direction.” How smart Hillary sounds now.)

Michelle Obama has a difficult assignment. She has to play it straight, and smart, and tough. But not too straight, or too smart, or too tough. She came out of this okay. It was definitely not too smart, but that wasn’t her fault. Of the six women on The View, Michelle Obama was definitely the lucky one.

What do Jim Gibbons and Eliot Sptizer Have in Common? Not a great deal, except that they, like the rest of us, have had their daily movements electronically tracked and recorded, and because they did, acts they considered to be private became public.

Spitzer, the former Governor of New York, was caught purchasing sex because the women he purchased it from were top-of-the-line prostitutes, and therefore he had to move large sums of money in order to pay them. The pattern of money movement suggested money laundering, which he was not doing, but it nonetheless brought him to the attention of the IRS.

Gibbons sent text messages to a recipient in whom the Nevada media has a prurient interest because of his pending divorce, and his rumored involvement with another woman. In an unfortunate failure of best practices, he used his government-issued phone, and the records belong to the public.

Could similar records have become available to law enforcement and the media before the advent of hand-held text messaging devices, and before banks had the powerful database technology employed for know-your-customer tracking? Certainly. But the two events spotlight the practical privacy concerns we all ignore every time we digitize our daily affairs.

Every single day, we sign away our privacy in return for the joy and convenience offered by technology. The average person makes the tradeoff multiple times a day, and is utterly cavalier about the possible consequences. It happens from the time you wake up until the time you go to sleep.

iTunes, for instance, knows you’re a dweeb who listened to the most pointless song ever recorded — Come on Eileen by Dexy’s Midnight Runners — 43 times in one week. Yahoo and Google also know what you like, if you know what I mean. Important or not? You never know until it becomes important.

Some years back when geo-tracking devices became widely available in cars, the Reasonable Reporter predicted, only half jokingly, that it would become more difficult to keep an extra-marital affair from coming to light. Not that the Reasonable Reporter condones extra-marital affairs, but she is a fan of privacy, and assumed that a large number of people would relate to the example. And there was certainly a point to be made that whatever convenience the service might provide, tracking every spot on the planet one chooses to visit could have a down side.

This was after the potential abuse of grocery store shopper cards was already being discussed. Recall the divorce attorney who delved into the ex-husband’s supermarket records, and made a successful case that if the guy could afford premium wines, he could afford more child support.

These developments seem primitive by current standards. The Las Vegas Review Journal reported this week that “Microsoft and Harrah’s just announced an interactive bar table that lets patrons order drinks, watch YouTube videos, play touch-screen games, and even flirt with each other.” The program will remember your favorite drinks, and facilitate snapping photos and swapping phone numbers with attractive strangers.

Hmmm… It’s almost impossible to count the ways this could become damaging on the morning after, or on some morning thereafter. Databases never forget.

Security agents at McCarran Airport are getting a detailed look inside your clothing. Anyone want to bet long it will be until those images end up on a website?

Soon, we’ll have toll roads. We will have them because it’s folly to think we’ll give up our cars, and it’s greater folly to think that the government can continue to spend a million dollars a mile to build a road, and still keep up with demand. We won’t and it can’t.

You’ll have a bar code on your bumper, scanned by a toll road reader to tax you by the mile. Or maybe an RFID chip. It will know where you went, what time you were there, and how fast you were going, but the speed check will be redundant, because of the black box under the hood, which the insurance companies are already lobbying to make standard.

There’s more. So much more. None of this is to bemoan greater use of high-tech devices. Technology makes us faster, richer, better and smarter, and we benefit from it every day. We just need to learn to be smarter than the people who own the databases.

Some years back, the Reasonable Reporter had a brief but intense love affair with Jungian psychology. For a young, self-obsessed single woman swirling in an urban stew of self-obsessed people, an ongoing seminar program for laypersons at the Jung Institute of San Francisco provided endless hours of fascination.

In those classes, the interpretation of dreams and personality types was taught. It’s precisely those two forces, of course, that drive the fates of the self-obsessed. Dreams, nightly, from the unconscious self. Personality types, daily, through the hell that is other people.

The fancy passed, in part because the Jungian landscape was so predominantly populated with introverted-feeling types — analyzed in their own terms — that a hard-edged thinking type had difficulty forming any lasting attachment with them. And they with her. But Jungian analytical tools remain useful for contemplating people and events.

Splashy political analysis is a rather un-Jungian pursuit. Hence you don’t see Jungians making the rounds as talking heads on the cable news channels, and if they did, they would need a lengthier forum than such programs allow. While they can be quite theatrical, Jungians tend neither toward brevity nor concreteness. Jungians tend to favor the language of myth and symbolism — another reason they aren’t preferred guests on political talk shows, and they don’t gravitate of their own accord toward those venues.

It’s a shame, because much of politics is expressed through myth and symbols. Jungians are the perfect people to interpret. They might offer tremendous insight about the relationship of the candidates to the electorate, drawing from study of the collective unconscious, that territory charted by the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung. This would be quite distinct from what’s offered by the TV screamers, harping nightly on misspoken phrases caught by news cameras. (Misspoken phrases, too, can be explained in Jungian terms. But clearly, that’s not the void in the market.)

Since last year, the Reasonable Reporter has longed for a wise, long-practicing Jungian to step forward and explain the wondrous, mystical what-and-why of Hillary Clinton. If such an analyst were to become available now, as the first viable female candidate for the White House is finally beaten, here are some questions for him or her:

Hillary is celebrated because she volunteered to reconcile the psychologically-charged roles of “woman” and “leader of the free world.” Was this a thankless task? Are those roles at odds in the collective unconscious? How does the unconscious respond to someone trying to project both warrior strength and motherly nurturance? Both cunning and kindness? Brazenness under the hot spotlight of politics, and femininity sufficient to be sympathetic?

If the unconscious has a way to read such a person, does Hillary even fit the archetype?

Is perceived sexism a sign of dissonant responses by the unconscious? Playing out in the world, for instance, as mass amusement over a doll in the likeness of Hillary bearing a nutcracker between its thighs? Are we amused because we deplore female strength? Or because we don’t know what to make of the woman claiming it?

We discuss the tendency of the voters to project onto candidates whatever tendencies they want in a leader. What kind of projections is Hillary carrying? Her feminist rhetoric has been astonishingly spare, but some suggest Hillary’s candidacy has been a vehicle for women of a certain age to project feminist anger at men. Is this possible, when we didn’t see much of Angry Hillary on the campaign trail?

What else was projected onto Hillary, and what projection did she carry well? Or badly? What does all of it say about Americans, collectively? Does Hillary seem true to herself? Can anyone answer that?

The Reasonable Reporter is in way over her head, but suspects the true meaning of Hillary is not anything we’ve contemplated up until now. Jungians welcome.

Last summer, when the presidential candidates were still wedged into their respective debate venues like too many SUVs in too few spaces meant for Honda Civics, and Nevada was still a campaign destination, the Reasonable Reporter was granted a sit-down interview with one of them. The time allotted was ten minutes.

The candidate arrived at the airport around dinner time, after a long flight from a state east of the Mississippi. He came directly to the event site, spoke to the assembled partisans for about 15 minutes, and then retired to a conference room for the interview, where he immediately requested a cup of coffee. His eyes were dull and dark-circled, and his skin had a grayish cast. The press coordinator said they’d gotten up at 4 a.m. after a late fundraising event.

(He. There will be no ambiguity about whether the candidate was Mrs. Clinton. It was not.)

The Reasonable Reporter often begins an interview with a politician by asking a question about his area of greatest expertise. There are several reasons for this, but mostly it’s a cover-your-cute-little-buns technique that ensures if the plug gets pulled early, there is at least one piece of tape containing complete sentences and a bit of substance to facilitate further research. God helps those who help themselves.

The coffee arrived, and the question was asked, and indeed, the candidate should have been able to go on at some length. The candidate, in fact, should have been able to hold up his end of a one-hour interview on just this subject, given his level of expertise.

He began to answer, and stopped in the middle of the first sentence. He started again, got about three sentences into it and then stopped.

The candidate looked helplessly at the Reasonable Reporter and said, “I know what you mean, but…”

He took a swig of coffee and said “Let’s start again.” At which point he fell back on a talking point, although it was clear that his original intention had been to deliver something more.

The months passed, and then there were three. They’ve all been tired for many months, and tiredness does wreak hell with the human brain.

If you have doubts, ask someone who works the morning radio shift, where wake-up time is 3:30 a.m., day after day after freaking day. Drooling at dinner? Yes, if you can stay awake for dinner. Reading a newspaper? Well, you can stare at the words, but on any given day, the meaning can be quite unclear. Calling your spouse by the cat’s name? It’s been known to happen.

Someone should study the performance of the American presidential candidates in terms of mistakes per day, and then factor in the length of the campaign, the number of appearances, time zones traveled, and hours of sleep.

The results might show an amazing level of competence considering the circumstances. The mystery would be why relatively few blunders – given the stress on the human machine — manifest themselves in such devastating terms. References to assassination, for instance.

Maybe tiredness allows a glimpse into their souls, and maybe tiredness just mixes up the marbles. And maybe the regional primary advocates are right, and the primary period is just too long. Maybe several regionals would leave the hopefuls functioning better, and put them back in the Senate where they could pay proper attention to the very issues they claim to want to solve, and all the inappropriate utterances would be made in the proper zip code.

It is the solemn responsibility of intelligent people to wrestle with contradiction. The month of May has served up a heaping load of contradiction while the Reasonable Reporter was busy with other things, not the least of which was exploring the inherent contradictions in police work and motherhood, for a news series on female cops with kids.

Contradiction #1: As that work was being done, a woman who operated quite outside the law chose to end her life, rather than go to prison. The suicide of D.C. Madam Deborah Jeane Palfrey should have served to spotlight the nation’s schizophrenic public attitude toward the oldest profession. But it didn’t. Since we began to glorify ourselves by identifying and taunting hypocrites, news organizations are no longer occupied with analysis of victimless crimes.

A notable feature of Palfrey’s legal battle was the publication of phone records which were presumed to contain the identities of many high-profile Beltway customers. (While it yielded few that were considered “newsworthy” it caused some johns to scramble to the phone and order their attorneys to negotiate ways to keep their names quiet.)

Meanwhile, there are American cities where powerless, ordinary-citizen-johns are publicly humiliated through a program that publishes their names in newspapers, and forces them to pay money to attend federally subsidized “john school.” In john school, the customers are educated about the dangers of buying sex on the street. In some of the cities — the Planet San Francisco for instance, where political enlightenment dictates the designation “sex worker” rather than prostitute — the johns are chastised by former sex workers for the psychological harm their patronage causes the women. Sounds almost sexy, doesn’t it?

Did any of the late Deborah Jean Palfrey’s johns advocate, administer, or vote for the federal funding that pays for john schools? This contradiction has not been explored, and Palfrey’s suicide went rather unnoticed, as sex-and-politics stories go.

Contradiction #2: Hillary Clinton is offering up some finely-crafted contradiction, promising simultaneously that she will never give up the fight, and that she will support the nominee, implicit in which is that she will not be the nominee.

This seems to sum up a longstanding Hillary Clinton dilemma. She is the alpha dog who isn’t free to fully express her alpha-ness.

Recall the soft entry, with the chatty living room video and the pink suits. At Nevada caucus appearances, everyone who introduced Hillary or who spoke on her behalf reliably followed this three-part formula: Didn’t know her and I had no opinion of her. Then I met her, and was surprised by her intelligence. Oh, and I was really taken with how nice she is. She’s really nice. Really, she is.

The focus on nice was necessary, since Hillary was not considered likeable, and was generally not known for being nice.

Why didn’t they know what the rest of us smart girls know? It is not possible to be both the smartest girl in the class, and the most popular girl in the class. There are plenty of smart girls who can testify that nobody has ever pulled it off. The smart girls inside the campaign should have figured this out much sooner.

Hillary has gone from nicer-than-we-could-have-imagined, back to tougher- than-everyone-else. She broke down and cried in New Hampshire. Four months later she was touted in Indiana for having testicles. (The testicle talk was quickly put on ice, you should pardon the expression. It was just too amusing to be of any help.)

Contradiction #3: Apropos of nothing, except for voluntary immersion in contradictions of all kinds. iTunes has made it possible to spend a dollar and own a single song by an artist whose broader repertoire is not of any interest.

The Reasonable Reporter is not and has never been a fan of Bruce Springsteen. But as a student of audio production, she is prepared to credit him with one of the most perfect pieces of music ever produced, recently rediscovered through the miracle of iTunes.

For anyone who’s forgotten, and for anyone who’s never heard it, Tunnel of Love is a study in contradiction, swirling and bubbly on top, suggesting the ecstatic giddiness of being swept into love. Beneath the top tracks, there’s a strength and consistency that supports the song’s lyrics, which lay out the maturity and commitment required to stay in love once you’re up to your neck in it.

All the while, every sting and strain and guitar strum on every track is clear, and the song is subtly punctuated with the sounds of carnival rides. Subtly punctuated, she repeated.

In two decades since the song was produced, multi-track production technology has become so simple, anyone can do it. But nobody is engaging in this kind of artistry. Check it out, you can’t beat it for a buck.

“Hold on a second, Sweetie,” said the Democratic front-runner to the female reporter. And Barack Obama says John McCain has lost his bearings! What’s next, for crying all night, “How’s it going, toots?” “Be right with ya, doll?”

The Reasonable Reporter is not particularly sensitive about misplaced terms of endearment from men. Most men mean well. And let’s face it, some of the things they say are just plain funny.

One former boss actually said, in the context of a formal review, “You know, you’re a very sharp gal.” That’s some damn funny material, and why squelch it? God knows, there’s little enough humor in the workplace.

But in politics, the guys who blast beyond the level of, let’s say, Commissioner of Traffic and Parking — they need to mind their manners when it comes to interactions with women. That’s because lots of women are touchy as hell about the way you treat them.

(And this is ironic, considering how an association to any sex-related misstep by just the right man can pay off in spades for a sharp gal. Consider Eliot Spitzer’s call girl, whose singing ambitions were discovered, and who racked up thousands of downloads from people curious to sample her music after the former New York governor’s prostitution scandal broke.)

Now Detroit TV reporter Peggy Agar has national profile as a result of having been double-dissed by a presidential candidate, who simultaneously ducked her question and addressed her as “sweetie.” Agar was presented with an interesting dilemma. Let it pass, and become the heroine of local newsroom folklore, or report it, which would inevitably put her at the center of the story.

Agar recorded her now-famous news package, in which she focused on campaign issues. She included audio of her own shouted question to Obama and the sweetie response, and tagged out of her report saying, “This sweetie never did get an answer to that question.”

This was not necessarily the wrong choice, given our American fixation with fake respect in politics, and given that Mr. Obama is beating the socks off of a classic 1970s feminist. The blunder needed to be reported, and by the way, it was reported by other outlets, something any first-year journalism student could have predicted.

But Agar took a cheap shot, which was the easy way out. When she decided to make herself part of the story, she put herself on the hook for pursuing the interesting question: Shouldn’t a law professor- Democratic politician- minority presidential candidate who came of age in the 1980s know better?

She might have been justified in breaking with protocol to chase down Obama and his entourage like a bunch of dogs, and throw a righteous fit — off camera — in order to end up with a great step-back piece about gender and power and elitism, topics which have become central to this race.

Of course, the Reasonable Reporter has no idea what Agar was up against in that particular situation. Sometimes it’s impossible to push, sometimes there are physical constraints, sometimes you really do need a moment to think. She may have lost the opportunity by pausing to ask herself, um, did he just call me sweetie?

As for Obama, he later called her and more-or-less owned up losing his bearings. He made a very skillful apology, and that’s why he’s the front-runner.

Hey wait a minute — isn’t this the state that made divorce into a commodity? Why the preoccupation with our governor’s failed marriage?

Here’s why: because there’s a lingering bit of neurosis in our American souls that says politicians should have solid marriages, while surgeons, college professors, accountants, hair dressers, and bus drivers can get divorced with no inquiry as to its affect on their job performance. This says a lot more about our attitude toward government than it does about our attitude toward marriage or professional competence.

Governor Gibbons has asked for privacy, and few details are available. That hasn’t stopped us from placing it at the top of the news, and won’t stop further probing into the most personal details from Jim and Dawn Gibbons’ marriage. Someone will get them, and someone will publish them.

What won’t be described, because it can’t be, is their personal anguish. Those who haven’t experienced divorce can’t do it justice, and those who have, if they’ve got a beating heart, would rather not try.

The Reasonable Reporter recalls an earlier chapter, when a chilly darkness descended over her own household while the daily business of life went on for more than a year. Weekends were planned, dry cleaning was picked up, friends were entertained, material obligations were met. But there was an odd emptiness to it all.

More strange, in retrospect, was the utter lack of eye contact. How do two people live under the same roof day after day, week after week, and never look each other in the eye?

Ah, the tidal wave of relief on the day the word was finally spoken. “Divorce.” It wasn’t until three months later, during the final sweep of the vacuum cleaner over the vacant floors of a vacant house, that the sadness finally set in.

As for job performance, it sharpened during and after the divorce. The job was a place to focus. Besides, when your worthiness as a life partner is called into question, professional competence takes on new importance. Hell, your boss always loves you as along as you deliver the goods. That’s one relationship where the rules are clear cut.

Probably, no two divorces are alike. But one suspects the broad outlines are similar. And one hopes we can honor the boundaries. It’s not up to us, of course, it’s up to our bosses, who love us as long as we deliver the goods.

The hijacking of the Nevada Republican convention by Ron Paul supporters was not exactly a stealth attack. Let’s begin with the premise that people who unselfconsciously declare a revolution are very likely committed to make something happen.

Beyond that, all the indications were there. Although the GOP numbers were dwarfed by the Democratic Turn-Nevada-Blue campaign, and remained in its shadow for the purpose of news coverage, Republican pre-caucus registration surged. The overwhelmingly unifying characteristic about the new registrants was their support for Ron Paul.

How about the Washoe County convention? Fully a third of those present were Paul supporters, and they were not shiny, happy Republican attendees, but rather the in-your-face variety, pushing a string of unsuccessful and time-consuming fundamentalist libertarian amendments to the party platform. At last, the proposals became so frivolous that a Paul campaign official and one of his local stalwarts took the most vocal of their activists aside, and told him to give it a rest.

The most significant (and under-analyzed) sign that Nevada’s “Ron Paul Revolution” wouldn’t peter out — Paul’s second-place caucus finish behind Mitt Romney, and ahead of now-presumptive nominee John McCain, who still has only lukewarm support from the party’s base.

And what can be said about the established institution that knows a revolution is brewing, and fails to fend off the attack? In this case, the phrase that comes to mind is, “I’m ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille.”

Now comes the once-luminous Republican Norma Desmond, batting her giant false eyelashes and twirling her beach umbrella, assuming, ridiculously, that she’s still as commanding as she was in her prime, as the silent screen legend. The Ron Paul revolutionaries are her Joe Gillis, dressed as her boyfriend in the elegant clothing she provides, taking refuge in her mansion. For his own selfish purposes, Joe indulges the delusions of the no-longer alluring diva, who’s oblivious to a new world turning outside the walls of her compound.

How did the Nevada Republican party become Norma Desmond? First, by living in a state of apparent denial. Second, by cutting off communication with the outside world. Or perhaps they never were inclined to communicate, and now that the GOP’s best days seem to be in the rear view mirror, nobody in the party knows how to do it.

Many Republican politicians, as the Reasonable Reporter has previously noted, are loath to interact with the media, and conduct such interactions grudgingly when they deign to engage in them. The party has been slow to adopt advanced communication technology. It also seems blissfully unaware that in the street, there is the kind of disdain for its core philosophies that can be addressed only with vigorous communication.

Even in a year when they acknowledge they’re fighting for their lives, the Silver State’s Republicans can’t muster a communication strategy. Their missives are occasional, and mostly inconsequential to the day’s events. They tend not to try to drive the news, which is, by the way, an endeavor never abandoned for long by the Silver State’s Democrats, who are quite skilled at it.

Who can expect grassroots enthusiasm, when there’s such tepid public outreach from the organization? Recall that when Norma Desmond finally appeared in person at MGM to confront studio executives, the guards at the front gate of the empire her stardom helped to build didn’t know who she was.

The Ron Paul revolutionaries know they’re on a suicide mission, but they don’t care. They are there, no matter what they say, to disrupt the nomination process. In the end, they, like Joe Gillis, will float face down in the pool at Norma Desmond’s mansion, riddled with bullets from her gun. Norma, having snuffed the discordant element in her life, will descend the grand staircase, preening for the news cameras, convinced that they’re capturing her close-up for the movies, rather than her final exit from Sunset Blvd.