A hard-boiled perspective

Politics is hard to follow sometimes. Here's a hard-boiled perspective.

Chicago, 1968. Saw the fires. Heard the glass breaking. Saw Mayor Daly call in the B-52s.
Everybody else thought it was Civil War II. I figured Dusty's had run out of vodka again.

Last night, at the debate, Tom Brokaw asked John McCain where he spent his honeymoon. McCain jumped on a table and shouted, "I'm not George Bush."

Brokaw asked McCain for his favorite color. McCain shouted, "I'm not George Bush."

Passtimes? "I'm not George Bush."

I started to get the picture. McCain didn't actually go on a honeymoon with his wife. Bush did. That kind of thing sticks in a man's craw.

My advanced insight tells me the McCain campaign has polls that show Bush to be the single biggest obstacle to his election as president. That wouldn't surprise me. I don't think there will be another President Bush for 100 years.

McCain seems fixated on "crossing the aisle." He goes on about it as if it was a sacramental act, like ordering two beers at a time at Dusty's. You never hear him talking about walking down the aisle. I guess that seals it.

If this doesn't work out for McCain, maybe his wife, Cindy, will move on. She's still a chick. Maybe we'll have a beer some time at Dusty's.

I saw some odd things while I wrote about politics for 150 years. Once I was talking with Walter Mondale in a bar, and I noticed that he always had an aide sitting next to him. One would leave, another would jump into his place. It was choreographed. So I asked. Mondale was afraid that a woman would sit down next to him and someone would snap their picture. He's a preacher's son, you know. You also know he's never been touched by scandal, real or imagined.

Bob Dole was a stitch, the funniest politician I ever shared a plane with. You have to admire a man who was shot up in Italy and was still delivering hilarious, side-splitting one-liners decades later. Most of the World War II vets are gone now, and we'd be better off if they weren't.

I rode on Ted Kennedy's plane during one of his campaigns. They lost my bag. I didn't know that happened on charters. Kennedy's life and career are another matter

The most interesting landing I ever made was in South Dakota, at the Pine Ridge Indian reservation. I had been flying all day on a four-seater with George McGovern. The problem was that it was almost dark when we arrived, and the reservation didn't have an airport.

I thought this was going to be a problem. When I looked down, I saw dozens of cars lined up on a meadow with their lights on. Has McGovern said or done anything lately that pissed off the Indians? I wondered. But we got down and bounced to a stop across the meadow.

A couple of hours later, when it was even darker, we took off. I'm still here, which is something of a mystery to me.

I guess we have to get back to the debate, although I'd rather not. It wasn't interesting. It wasn't illuminating. It was canned rhetoric. I guess the only reason I watched it was that I wanted to know how many times McCain would talk about "crossing the aisle." I lost count.

Doesn't he understand that his crossing the aisle is the reason a lot of conservatives don't like him? Is he willing to go on alienating conservatives in exchange for liberal recruits? How does that math work out, exactly?

The biggest advance we could make in election technology is a new line that says, "None of the above."