So Chris Matthews asks his guests this week-end who should be TIME’s Man of the year. A couple of them pick Julian Assange, but Andrea Mitchell had another nomination:
ANDREA MITCHELL: I’m not going to say Julian Assange. I would say because of the midterm elections, the House going Republican, the Senate not going Republican, the Tea Party. They’ve changed the debate on deficit reduction. They’ve got, you’ve got Ron Paul now in charge of monetary policy from the House. They have changed politics for now in Washington.
All on their own. They changed politics. It just happened. It wasn’t an army of publicists, and it wasn’t relentless news coverage, and it wasn’t that a large group of Republicans is automatically due attention that a large group of, say, anti-war protesters couldn’t PAY for. They changed politics all on their own.
I was onVirtually Speaking last night (sorry for not giving a heads-up, but was preoccupied with a snowpocalypse and a batch of chocolate meringues) and one of the things we got to talking about was the Invisible Press Rules that exist whereby one thing to say (keep government out of my Medicare!) is acceptable and another thing (we can’t afford two wars) isn’t and nobody writes it down anywhere. And everybody acts like these rules just ARE, and haven’t been made up by people with an interest in any type of viewpoint whatsoever.
Which drives me absolutely bonkers, because I am all about the rules and regulations and if I don’t know what they are, I can’t follow them nor figure out how to circumvent them, and neither can anybody else.
A.