Friday, August 6, 2010

Where's the candidate forum?

If I were managing the local paper, there would be a story in today's edition about Wednesday's LD1 candidate forum, organized by the League of Women Voters at YC. I saw Lynn McMaster there taking pics and Bill Monroe and Don Steel taking sound and interviews. I didn't see a Courier photographer or reporter.

Quite apart from my agreement with her on most of the issues, I thought Lindsay Bell was clearly very confident, well prepared and well spoken, standing head and shoulders above Noel Campbell's know-nothing jingoism, Karen Fann's smug naivete and Rep Andy Tobin's all-about-me fatuousness. Lindsay brought clear, specific, positive ideas to the table, where her opponents relied on ideology and slogans.

On the Senate side, Sen Steve Pierce was able to coast on his cowboy-patrician air because Bob Donahue couldn't seem to organize his thoughts or project any confidence in his ideas, which on paper aren't bad. I got the feeling he'd be eaten alive at the capitol.

Followup, Sunday: I thought the editors might have been saving the story for the Sunday edition, but no dice. This adds to the mound of actions indicating unwillingness at the Courier to cover Democrats. Prove me wrong, editors.

Fumble on the field, who's got the ball?

As our Accidental Governor coasts to victory in the primary, I've been saying for a while that her biggest weakness in the general campaign will be that she'll have to open her mouth in public. Today's alert on the special session to fix the anti-card-check initiative contains a perfect example. Says the Gov:

"The right to cast your vote without fear or intimidation is a fundamental tenant of our democracy."

The interesting question here is how this telltale flub of the tongue got into the AP-slugged story, which is all over the Net. I'm completely confident that the Governor could confuse "tenet" with "tenant" in speech, but one would expect an editor to correct the fumble and print what she clearly meant to say. (Despite President Bush's consistent inability to pronounce it correctly, the papers always wrote "nuclear" when he said "nookyular.") So did the reporter and editors also mistake the word? Did the editors decide to leave the Governor's mistake in? Or did perhaps the Governor get it right and the reporter and editors inject the mistake?