Tod Kelly

Over the weekend I posted the argument that unlike with other elected officials, in today’s modern media world we tend to pick presidents based more on “likability” than qualifications, experience or record. My Jumping-Off-Point was the Gary Hart scandal from 1988, and one of the interesting conversations in the threads was the topic of why some political sex scandals are get widely reported and others don’t. The seemingly obvious answer is bias against one party, but this doesn’t hold up so well. For example, the press had the opportunity to report on the rumored infidelities of George H.W. Bush and John McCain, both GOP nominees for the office of President. They chose to run with only one of the two. The GOP talked for years about a Constitutional amendment that would allow foreign-born citizens to run for president so they could run popular California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. His out-of-wedlock child was talked about for years without editors pulling triggers; and yet Herman Cain – a candidate no one really took seriously – had his indiscretions dissected at the drop of a hat. What sells a sex scandal is the tittilation of sex, but the sex itself is rarely the true transgression. The conversation in the threads led me to this mental exercise: If I were the editor of a major newspaper, which of the big political sex scandals would I have run with early, and which would I have held off on? 

In order to do this, I needed to start off with a “given” and a number of ground rules. My given was this: I don’t have a problem with sex in and of itself, and I tend to think for the most part what happens between adults in private is their own affair. Which means, just because someone had sex doesn’t mean that it should be newsworthy. My ground rules are as follows:

1. Since part of what I wanted to do was see how I would match up with actual editors, I needed to judge each case on what was known or suspected at or just before the time the story “broke.” Because of this, you’ll see that there are several cases where I believe I would have made a call to run (or not) that I would eventually have regretted.

2. I am assuming I am just the story editor, and not the layout editor. So I am not going to go into questions about whether something should have been front page, or above or below the fold, or really anything except should the story should be run or held.

3. In this exercise I am a Lou Grant-type editor, and my job is to be a crusty champion of “news, dammit!”; whether or not we gain or lose revenue by my decisions is not my concern.

Keep in mind that I make no claims that these decisions are capital “g” Good or capital “r” Righteous. They are simply a way for me to put myself in someone else’s shoes for an hour to see what I might learn.  WIth that said, here are the choices I would have made: Continue reading this post…

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It appears that Tim Tebow and his legal team are about to file a lawsuit against Cubby Tees, a tee shirt manufacturer. Cubby Tees, in an obvious attempt to cash in on the buzz surrounding Tebow’s move to the NY Jets, is marketing a new shirt that toys with the Jets’ logo. Instead of saying NY Jets it says My Jesus, and the simple football graphic has been replaced with the ubiquitous Christian Ichthyis. The shirt does not mention Tebow by name, nor does it sport his number. Were you not to know who Tebow was, there is no way to connect him to the shirt. And yet the connection is undeniable.

Oy. I’ve never quite been able to figure out what I think about Tim Tebow. This is because in my head, there are actually two Tebows.

There is Tim Tebow, the famously devout football player from Florida that plays quarterback a la Knute Rockne. I find myself liking this Tim Tebow. He reminds me of other sports favorites of mine, like Derek Fisher, Steve Largent or Oral Hershiser – those people that lacked the natural gifts and skills of those they competed against and thus should have been quick washouts, and yet always found a way to win. These kind of athletes have a special place in my heart, a sports fan who has never himself been in any way athletically inclined. I saw this Tim Tebow a lot last year as he led the Broncos deep and inexplicably into the playoffs and found myself rooting for him.

But there’s also Tim Tebow™, the cynically marketed, pre-packaged product. It was always hard for me to believe that the “anti-Tebow” brouhaha was in no small part manufactured by Tebow’s™ publicists, looking to find a way to cash in on a graduating college quarterback that seemed to have little long-term NFL value. It seemed improbable that he would be anything other than the next Brian Bosworth, so Tebow’s™ marketing team set out to cash in on a Christian martyr while they could. Continue reading this post…

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I have a friend that I used to hang out with back in the 90s. He was older than I was, and during the years leading up to the 1988 election he worked for the AP following the various Democratic Presidential wannabes that were touring the Midwest and East coast in what would end up being a monumentally poor attempt at defeating the Reagan-lite George Bush. I heard him talk about candidate Gary Hart a number of times to various people (usually after a few Long Island iced teas), and each time he said the same thing. I’ve retold this story to more than a few people over the years, and every now and then someone will say, “Oh yeah, I had a friend that worked for X back then, and they tell me the same thing.” So I have come to believe this anecdote; you may not.

For those much, much younger than I, Gary Hart was a Colorado Senator – and for a while he was widely presumed to be the savior of the Democratic Party. He was young(ish), good looking in that monied and WASPy kind of way, and when you saw him speak he just had that… something. People loved him. I mean, they really loved him – and not just Dems. Comparisons were made to JFK, back in a time when comparisons to JFK weren’t made with any candidate that had a full head of hair. For most of the country’s liberals it wasn’t a question of if he would be the next president, but the size of electoral landslide to which he’d coast.

Wait, did I mention people loved him? I did? Well, women really loved him, and he had a reputation of loving them back – in that way that married men aren’t supposed to love women back. Rumors kept popping up about dalliances with models, actresses and attractive groupies in their teens and twenties. Wanting to dispense with all the rumors, Hart finally said to the press: “Follow me around. I don’t care. I’m serious. If anybody wants to put a tail on me, go ahead.” This turned out to be an entirely unwise thing to say, since the press did just that and caught him in a dalliance less than 48 hours later… with a 29 year old model who would turn the scandal into a lucrative contract for a photo shoot with Playboy… on a yacht that bore the name – I swear am not making this up – Monkey Business… where he stupidly had other people take pictures of the two of them together. In the wink of a flirtatious eye, Hart’s political career was done. Continue reading this post…

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