Red Meat Season

Go home and start a petition drive. Pass out fliers.

Last week in Miami, McCain suggested, prefiguring Ron Paul's comment, that his rivals are just "pandering for votes":

"To want the office so badly that you would intentionally make our country's problems worse might prove you can read a poll or take a cheap shot, but it hardly demonstrates presidential leadership."

He's gambling that there are votes to be gained by appearing statesmanlike. Professional driver: Do not attempt.

But even the maverick McCain knows where the lines are drawn during Red Meat Season. At last week's debate, he mentioned alternative energy, and started to say something that began with "s." Could he possibly have been about to utter the word "solar"? There's a liberal Democrat word if there ever was one. Verbal tofu! A Republican can't speak that word, any more than he can announce that, if elected, his inauguration suit will be made of hemp. Luckily, McCain caught himself and talked about ethanol instead.

At one point, talking about immigration, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani used the word "compromises" four times in about 15 seconds -- and he wasn't holding it out as a virtue.

But the classic pejorative for Republicans is "Ted Kennedy." Hunter, for example, would like to convince the party base that top-tier candidates Romney, Giuliani and McCain all emanate the malodorous and mephitic stench of Kennedy liberalism. Romney, he said, supported a 1994 gun control law advocated by the Massachusetts senator and President Bill Clinton. "I saw John McCain join with Ted Kennedy on the border control bill," he told me. "I think we need to abandon the Kennedy wing of the Republican Party."

On the Democratic side, the sneaking suspicion is that front-runner Hillary Clinton may be a neocon, as opposed to what the Republicans believe she is (Madame Mao reincarnate). John Edwards, who four years ago positioned himself as the "positive, upbeat" candidate, has transmogrified into a red-meat partisan, firmly camped to the left of the Bush-collaborating Clinton and Obama. And then there's Mike Gravel, a former senator from Alaska, who last week had some USDA Choice words for anyone who voted to give Bush authorization to go to war:

"We have killed more Americans than was done on the 11th of September," he said. "More Americans died because of their decision. That disqualifies them for president. It doesn't mean they're bad people. It just means that they don't have moral judgment."

For Democrats, sanctimony is the other red meat.

Of course, the media are complicit in nurturing the rancor of Red Meat Season. It's not just that we compulsively cover every medium-sized political squabble as though it's the Battle of Antietam, or that we cover partisan politics more fervently than we cover government (there were several hundred journalists at the GOP debate in New Hampshire, probably more than have cumulatively covered the Justice Department in the past 200 years). We also prod candidates to disagree in the most visceral manner, ideally involving vulgarity, scratching, biting, gnawing on ankles, etc.

From the mainstream newspapers to the cable TV shoutfests to the shrieking political blogs, there's an infrastructure that distributes red meat wholesale. We operate the same way that cat-food companies fill up all those little cans in the factory: We use pumpable meat. We give abundant coverage to the cranks, curmudgeons and wing nuts of American politics. Tom Tancredo, come on down! Tancredo, a Republican congressman from Colorado, revealed in the debate that he's so extreme and difficult a character that even the evil-genius Bush adviser Karl Rove can't stand him. He said Bush has governed as a liberal and opined that McCain's immigration bill raised the question of "whether or not we will actually survive as a nation." On Planet Tancredo, we're just one bilingual classroom away from total destruction.