A front-page article in this morning's New York Times runs under the headline, "With Glare Hitting Clinton, Limelight Eludes Schumer."
This is sort of funny in itself. There's a picture of Senator Schumer on the front page of the New York Times. His name is in the headline. And yet the Times claims he is eluding the limelight.
There's more. The article reports that "Mr. Schumer's friends were so concerned that he might shrivel in the limelight of his new colleague, in fact, that they briefly considered having a celebrity-filled party for his 50th birthday on a scale that the Clintons themselves might have staged."
That's it. The Times just leaves this suggestion hanging there tantalizingly without reporting how Mr. Schumer actually celebrated his 50th birthday. If the Times reporter couldn't figure it out, he might check with the newspaper's publisher, who might be able to fill him in.
The news article also claims that "Mr. Schumer has a hurried manner." This is a matter of opinion, and would be better explained with anecdotes, quotations or more detailed description than with such a judgmental adjective. What is hurried to someone from the Deep South can be slow-paced to a New Yorker. The editor of Smartertimes.com has had several encounters with Mr. Schumer and has never found him hurried.
Most disappointing about this story, though, is the way it is an example of the tendency of the Times to emphasize personality at the expense of policy in its reporting on politics. The article manages to mention Mr. Schumer's birthday party and Mrs. Clinton's hairstyle near the beginning, but substance is relegated to a glancing reference at the end of the article. The Times reports that "Mr. Schumer is pushing to make college tuition tax-deductible," but there's no discussion of whether this would be a wise policy decision. There's no mention of how Mr. Schumer is doing in meeting his campaign pledge to push for a move of the American embassy in Israel to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv. And there's no mention of Mr. Schumer's decision to assemble a "Group of 35" to examine the supposed crisis of a lack of commercial space in the New York real estate market, just as that market was about to ease and the supposed crisis was about to abate.
"Unregulated, Unlimited": A front-page news article in today's New York Times about Senator McCain's effort to trample the First Amendment by restricting political speech twice refers to "soft money" donations to the political parties as "unlimited, unregulated." As Smartertimes.com noted last week, it's just false to say that soft money is now "unregulated." Disclosure is required, and there is a regulatory agency, the Federal Election Commission, charged with enforcing the disclosure requirement. That disclosure requirement in itself constitutes a regulation. The idea that soft money is "unregulated" is scare language thrown around by those hoping to impose more regulations on an activity, political speech, that is already regulated beyond the level dictated by a reasonable interpretation of the First Amendment. Would the Times describe those going to church and praying on Sunday -- another First Amendment-protected activity -- as engaging in "unregulated" prayer? As it is, soft money donations are regulated much more rigorously than other First Amendment activities such as prayer or newspaper editorial-writing.