By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, March 27, 2008; 10:45 AM

On Dec. 9, 1999, after riding the Straight Talk Express in New Hampshire, I wrote a Post piece headlined "Nothing Succeeds Like Access; Does John McCain Have the Media Eating Out of His Hand?"

It was the first of many reports I would file on the McCain-media romance, both in that campaign and again this time around. So I don't need much convincing that the Arizona senator is adept at working the press.

But there are differences in this campaign, and some critics are painting with too broad a brush. Now that he's the presumptive Republican nominee, and doing well in head-to-head matchups with Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, some liberal critics are complaining that the press is prostrate when it comes to the 71-year-old Republican. Why aren't reporters tearing him down?

To start with the obvious, many journalists admire McCain's military service and his courage as a POW. They like his maverick approach to politics. They appreciate being able to spend hours each day questioning him, and are usually less likely to play "gotcha" because they understand the fuller context of his answers. Still, that doesn't amount to immunity: When he screwed up on Iran and al-Qaeda, everyone reported it.

More in a moment, but first let me turn to a journalist and author I admire, Neal Gabler, who argues in a NYT op-ed that reporters are in such a swoon that they have practically become McCainiacs:

"Seeming to view himself and the whole political process with a mix of amusement and bemusement, Mr. McCain is an ironist wooing a group of individuals who regard ironic detachment more highly than sincerity or seriousness. He may be the first real postmodernist candidate for the presidency -- the first to turn his press relations into the basis of his candidacy . . .

"Yet however much his accessibility, amiability and candor may have defined the news media's love affair with him in 2000, and however much they continue to operate that way in 2008, there is also something different and more complicated at work now. Joan Didion once described a presidential campaign as a closed system staged by the candidates for the news media -- one in which the media judged a candidate essentially by how well he or she manipulated them, and one in which the electorate were bystanders . . .

"What makes 2008 different -- and why I think Mr. McCain can be called the first postmodernist presidential candidate -- is his acknowledgment of the symbiosis between himself and the press and, more important, his willingness, even eagerness, to let the press in on his own machinations of them . . .

"Though Mr. McCain can be the most self-deprecating of candidates (yet another reason the news media love him), his vision of the process also betrays an obvious superiority -- one the mainstream political news media, a group of liberal cosmologists, have long shared. If in the past he flattered the press by posing as its friend, he is now flattering it by posing as its conspirator, a secret sharer of its cynicism . . .

"The candidates who are dead serious about politics, even wonkish, get abused by the press for it. Mr. McCain the ironist gets heaps of affection. In this race, though, it has forced some press contortions. While John McCain 2000 was praised for being the same straight talker off the bus as he was on it, John McCain 2008 is praised precisely because he isn't the same man. Off the bus he plays to the rubes (us) by reciting the conservative catechism; on the bus he plays to the press by giving the impression that his talk is all just a ploy to capture the Republican nomination."

Here are some of the inconvenient facts that Gabler leaves out:

¿ There is a risk in subjecting yourself to endless questioning from reporters, and that inevitably leads to blunders.

¿ There are far more journalists who cover McCain, in the sense of reporting on and analyzing his record and rhetoric, than the small band that flies around with him.

¿ When McCain moved to the right last year, liberal columnists savaged him. E.J. Dionne wrote of "The McCain Tragedy." Jonathan Alter titled a piece "McCain's Meltdown." And unlike in 2000, we're five years into the Iraq war, which McCain has championed and which is not real popular in media circles.

¿ Last summer, McCain's supposed paramours in the press declared him dead, buried, kaput, when his fundraising collapsed and top aides bailed, and they basically stopped covering him for months.

¿ McCain has gotten good coverage in recent months not because he's impressed hack journalists but because he's impressed voters. He won the nomination, and winners always get better headlines than also-rans.

¿ The rapport with the media didn't stop the New York Times from publishing that (badly flawed) story on his relationship with a female lobbyist, or McCain from hitting back hard.

¿ Despite his rough couple of weeks, does anyone want to argue that Obama hasn't been a bigger media darling this year than McCain?

On balance, McCain still benefits from his media chroniclers, but let's keep things in perspective.

Time's Michael Scherer calls Gabler's essay "pretty close to spot on," but adds that "the same effect works on voters as well, at least at the town halls I attended in New Hampshire and Iowa. Voters are sick of being lied to by politicians, so it can be refreshing when a politician admits that he is nothing more than a politician. This always seemed to me an untold part of Mitt Romney's inability to connect with voters. He was always in character, and had a tough time making fun of himself.

"Of course, this new PoMo political world brings new problems. When he jokes and winks and self-deprecates, McCain may be showing something about himself, but he is also playing a character, which has been honed for years in the halls of Congress and on the campaign trail. Gabler's warning is necessary: Just because a candidate pokes fun at himself does not necessarily mean he is any less of a fraud. (Nor does it mean he is more of a fraud.) It just means that we reporters still have our work cut out for us."

American Prospect's Dana Goldstein sees a more fundamental flaw:

"I'd add that, like John McCain, most members of the campaign press corps just aren't all that interested in or knowledgeable about public policy. Most cover politics, as it's so often been noted, as a sport."

McCain, he reminds us, "now opposes Roe v. Wade, marriage equality, comprehensive sex-ed, and doesn't believe condoms prevent the spread of HIV. So if we journalists value skepticism and cynicism so much, we should really be applying some to John McCain."

Mac gave a big foreign policy speech yesterday:

"Sen. John McCain, carefully distancing himself from President Bush and seeking to sound a moderate tone, called Wednesday for stronger ties with allies and cautioned that American power 'does not mean that we can do whatever we want, whenever we want,' " the Chicago Tribune reports.

"His address Wednesday in Los Angeles instead tapped themes bound to appeal more strongly to moderates and Democratic crossover voters. He said the government should close its prison for terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and 'work with our allies to forge a new international understanding' on how to treat detainees. He said Americans need to be 'good stewards of our planet' and urged steps to limit greenhouse gas emissions."

The NYT notes another aspect:

"Invoking his family's military history -- his father and grandfather were admirals -- and his own service in Vietnam, Mr. McCain said: 'I detest war. It may not be the worst thing to befall human beings, but it is wretched beyond all description.'

"Nevertheless, he said: 'We have incurred a moral responsibility in Iraq. It would be an unconscionable act of betrayal, a stain on our character as a great nation, if we were to walk away from the Iraqi people and consign them to the horrendous violence, ethnic cleansing and possibly genocide that would follow a reckless, irresponsible and premature withdrawal.' "

Does Hillary have some increasingly strange bedfellows? Christopher Orr runs through the list in the New Republic:

"1) Matt Drudge hyped a photo of Obama in Somali garb that he claimed (and the Clinton campaign declined to deny) Clinton staffers had been circulating.

"2) Bill Clinton went on the Rush Limbaugh show on the day of the Texas primary -- after Limbaugh had spent days urging GOP voters in the state to cross over and vote for Clinton in order 'rig' the election and ensure that Democrats nominated the weaker of their two candidates.

"3) The Clinton campaign has been circulating an article in The American Spectator alleging that an Obama adviser, former Air Force chief Merrill McPeak, is an anti-semite and a drunk.

"4) When Clinton attacked Obama on Jeremiah Wright, she did it at an editorial meeting of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, the vanity publication of Richard Mellon Scaife, while sitting next to Scaife himself.

"Drudge. Limbaugh. The American Spectator. Richard Mellon Scaife. What exactly is it going to take before Clinton campaign staffers recognize that they are, in essence, now working for the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy?"

The Scaife sit-down alone, says Josh Marshall, "has to amount to some sort cosmic encounter like something out of a Wagner opera. Remember, this is the guy who spent millions of dollars puffing up wingnut fantasies about Hillary's having Vince Foster whacked and lots of other curdled and ugly nonsense. Scaife was the nerve center of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy. Those of us who spent years defending the Clintons from all that malarkey learned this point on day one."

I'm seeing more and more pieces like this one in the Boston Globe:

"Some Democratic Party leaders are growing more concerned that the protracted, caustic fight for the presidential nomination will cripple the eventual nominee, and there are new signs they have reason to worry . . .

"While the Democrats have been arguing almost daily the past two weeks about each other's electability and integrity, McCain has visited Iraq and other countries in the Middle East and Europe, received the blessing Tuesday of Nancy Reagan, and yesterday delivered a sweeping address on foreign policy."

The latest worry: a Gallup poll showing that 28 percent of Hillary backers would vote for McCain over Obama, and 19 percent of Obama supporters would defect to McCain.

Hillary continues to get beat up over Bosnia by the right, the left and mainstream columnists such as Dick Polman:

"Maybe she was hoping that the toy companies would agree to market a Hillary Clinton Action Figure. More likely, she was probably hoping that she could inflate her meager foreign policy experience by goading the electorate into swallowing a lie. Now that Clinton has been exposed as a serial peddler of falsehoods, in her retelling of the 1996 visit she made to Bosnia as First Lady, it's worth noting why this campaign episode is important. She has based her increasingly desperate candidacy on the proposition that she is best qualified to be commander-in-chief at 3 a.m. on Day One, and that in turn hinges on the argument that she has passed some of the character tests that are requirements for command. Physical courage, for example.

"Hence, her desire to make people believe -- in direct contradiction to the facts, as captured on video -- that she braved sniper fire in Bosnia. And it's not actually the lie that was most telling. It's her attempt to lie about the lie."

The latest poll news: "The racially charged debate over Barack Obama's relationship with his longtime pastor hasn't much changed his close contest against Hillary Clinton, or hurt him against Republican nominee-in-waiting John McCain, according to a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll."

Obama is tied with Clinton, 45-45, up a couple of points from two weeks ago. Plus, Obama beats McCain by a statistically insignificant 44-42, while Hillary loses to McCain by 2.

National Review's Byron York, noting that the Obamas' tax returns showed them making as much as $1.6 million a year, raises a question about Michelle:

"When I saw Mrs. Obama at an appearance in Zanesville, Ohio last month, she was telling a group of low-income women -- the median household income in the county in which Zanesville is located was $37,192 in 2004, well below the state and national medians -- about how hard it can be to keep things together. Her talk often touched on money. 'I know we're spending -- I added it up for the first time -- we spend between the two kids, on extracurriculars outside the classroom, we're spending about $10,000 a year on piano and dance and sports supplements and so on and so forth,' she told the women of her own household expenses. 'And summer programs. That's the other huge cost. Barack is saying, 'Whyyyyyy are we spending that?' And I'm saying, 'Do you know what summer camp costs?' ''

"The women nodded in agreement, although the Obamas were spending what amounted to nearly a third of a Zanesville resident's annual income on piano and dance lessons. Nevertheless, Michelle Obama portrayed herself and her husband as going through a lot of the same struggles as the women and their families. She conceded that she was doing fine financially, but only after Barack Obama hit it big with his books."

The L.A. Times is enmeshed in a case involving allegedly phony government documents that carries the aroma of the CBS/National Guard fiasco. I've got the details here. And the paper has now apologized.

Finally, today's New York sex-story installment:

"Disgraced former Gov. Eliot Spitzer has been identified as a long-standing client of a second high-priced call-girl ring, The New York Post has learned.

"The ex-governor regularly patronized Wicked Models, the Manhattan-based operation taken down Tuesday, according to financial documents and other evidence unearthed in a yearlong prostitution [investigation], law-enforcement sources said . . .

"At the center of the new ring is Kristin 'Billie' Davis, a busty bottle blonde who hails from a [r]ough-and-tumble California trailer park."

Yes, there's a photo.