<![CDATA[IS THE MCCAIN TRAIN SLOWING?]]>Smart little piece by Vaughn Ververs, editor of the Hotline, Washington’s favorite addiction. He points out that John McCain’s interview in Rolling Stone, where McCain said he’d have accepted the vice-presidential nod if Bush had asked him, got barely any media buzz. (Ververs’ mention was the first I’d heard of it.) Not surprising, I’d say. With campaign finance reform apparently inevitable and the tax cut imminent, the Bush-McCain rivalry stories have little wind behind them. Then there’s the Republican maverick niche, which has now been adopted by the craggy Luftmensch Jeffords. For my part, I always felt that McCain was a party man, and not prone to Jeffords-like shenanigans. Look how he played along after he lost the nomination to Bush. And look how he hasn’t had a cow over the tax cut. (McCain likes tax-cuts. He’s a Republican.) There’s still the hideously named Patients’ Bill of Rights, which McCain could exploit. But my best bet is that McCain is biding his time for a while. Which to my mind is the smartest thing for him to do.

HAZE IN WASHINGTON: Bummer of a day. Woke up with a fever and a voice that sounded like a cross between Bob Dole and Diane Rehm. Turns out I have bronchitis. What to do but slump with the beagle and try and read the latest Philip Roth. I don’t know of any writer who does as well with sex. Somehow he manages to make it faintly unsavory and yet ennobling. It’s also so refreshing to read a man who writes so easily about his sexual attraction for women, especially young women, without any of the usual p.c. cant. Good practice for my interview with Penthouse tomorrow. (It’s on politics, mercifully.) The only problem is that if you’re actually sick, reading is hard. I knew I was desperate when I found myself watching the evening news for the first time in months. What dreck. The actual information you get from Rather-Jennings-Brokaw is somewhat less than a couple of pages of cliché-ridden type, filled with stock video images. What’s the point? Jennings was reduced to announcing that tomorrow they’ll have a special feature on gadgets for retirees. It’ll make a nice interlude between the ads for incontinence pads and Maalox. And they take themselves soooo seriously.

HOME NEWS: You may have noticed the link to C-SPAN’s RealPlayer video of my Stanford speech. So many of you asked for it that we just put it up. Good luck with the download. Sorry, there’s no transcript. I make it up as I go along. But most of the ideas are developed at length in Virtually Normal.

]]>