A FEAST OF COMMENTARY

Like an Arctic cold front blowing in from the north, November has a way of sneaking up on you, delivering a reality check of what time it is.

The holiday season is upon us. Slowly, but also surely, we adjust to that annual change in routine that accompanies the transition from one year to the next. Our thoughts become preoccupied with family and home. Our focus begins with counting our blessings and ends with a hope for betterment through renewal.

Yet November also tantalizes with a hint of things to come. News is news because we can never predict the future, but news can also give us some unmistakable clues about what the future might hold. And never more so than in an election year, especially one in which the voters of November order up changes that alter the political landscape, asking for unpredictability over the status quo.

So for political commentators, this November has been an especially tasty feast. Once the election results were known and it became clear that Democrats would regain outright control of Congress for the first time in 12 years, they went to work to assess what such changes might mean. And thankfully in a country that thrives on a free and open debate, opinions were as varied as they were plentiful.

If you want to see just how varied, I thought we'd put links up on the 11th month output of Writers Group columnists who specialize in taking the country's political temperature. Read at your pleasure.

David S. Broder: The dean of Washington political correspondents is always a must-read during election years, but especially in post-vote November.

"Never was a political wipeout better advertised in advance than the one that hit the Republican Party on Tuesday and cost Don Rumsfeld his job," Broder began this column right after the vote. "From the first of my political soundings in the Midwest in early spring, it was clear that the public's frustration with the war in Iraq, the inept performance of the Bush administration after Hurricane Katrina, and the stunning partisanship and tawdriness of the Republican Congress was reaching explosive levels."

Broder's other must-reads are here and here.

George F. Will: The country's most influential conservative thinker found plenty for conservatives to think about.

"At least Republicans now know where the 'Bridge to Nowhere' leads: to the political wilderness," Will noted as the damage was being assessed. "But there are three reasons for conservatives to temper their despondency."

Other post-election columns are here and here.

E.J. Dionne Jr. had a message for Democrats: Remember who sent you.

"Democrats might usefully take a break from their inane round of back-stabbing and score-settling to focus, for a few moments, on why voters gave them their congressional majorities," Dionne noted in this column written as feuds were beginning to erupt. "A lot of Americans are hurting in the pocketbook, and if Democrats don't use the next two years to help them, the party will squander the trust it has temporarily earned."

Also see these Dionne columns: Here, here and here.

Marie Cocco analyzed the election and came up with this conclusion: Women rule!

"But numbers don't tell the whole story," Cocco wrote. "A new generation of power brokers will. For the first time ever, women won't just have a seat at the table. They'll decide what's in the agenda books that get placed on it -- and run the meetings."

Cocco continued on her election analysis theme in columns here, here and here.

And there's more:

Jabari Asim

Richard Cohen

Ellen Goodman

Jim Hoagland

David Ignatius

Ruben Navarrette Jr.

Kathleen Parker

Neal Peirce

Eugene Robinson

Robert Samuelson

Marcela Sanchez

James Hill is managing editor of The Washington Post Writers Group.

SERVING UP RADIO

I love doing radio -- almost as much as presiding over the Lean Plate Club each week. So when National Public Radio asked me to do a Thanksgiving essay for “Morning Edition,” I was delighted. What sweetened the deal is that I got to work again with NPR’s Jane Greenhalgh, who produced a 22-minute radio documentary that I did for NPR’s “All Things Considered” a number of years ago.

Radio makes you more disciplined as a writer. Remember those simple declarative sentences we learned in school? You have to write that way for radio. Just try taking a breath while reading a compound sentence filled with clauses. It doesn’t work.

Radio also makes you a better interviewer. In print, we sometimes warm up the people we interview with small talk to establish rapport. In radio, there’s no time to do that. You have to get right to the point.

When I was at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, we had to declare whether we would be going into print or broadcast. Print was my first love, but broadcasting sure was fun. These days, we do both right in our newsroom at the Washington Post.

Just this morning, I went from a staff meeting to an interview with KSAT, the Post Newsweek-owned television station in San Antonio. Then it was back to our weekly staff meeting. And after that, on to the studio in the newsroom for Washington Post Radio. (This can be heard outside the Washington region on the Internet at washingtonpost.com -- yet another new feature of our business.) People say that newspapers are dying. I like to think that they are evolving into a new combination media that allows us to connect not just with readers, but also with listeners, Web users and viewers. That’s what has enabled us to have loyal Lean Plate Club members not just from coast to coast, but throughout the world.  

We’re even bringing Lean Plate Club members on to television. During this year’s LPC Holiday Challenge -- designed just to help participants maintain their weight from Thanksgiving to New Year’s -- two Lean Plate Club members are keeping video blogs. (That’s vlogs in Web lingo; more than 200 Lean Plate Club members volunteered to be followed during this year’s Holiday Challenge.) We equipped the two members each with a video camera, trained them on how to use them and gave them FedEx envelopes to overnight the tape to us each week. Look for their efforts on our Web site at www.leanplateclub.com. 

Sally Squires is a Washington Post staff writer whose Lean Plate Club column is syndicated by The Washington Post Writers Group.

WANT TO MAKE WAVES?

EDITOR'S NOTE: This is another in an occasional series by guest bloggers on developments in the news business.

On Nov. 10, I covered a panel featuring retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor and 6th U.S. Circuit Judge Danny Boggs at an American Bar Association appellate judges’ conference in a Dallas suburb. O’Connor had many of the same comments about judicial independence that she’s offered all over the country. But two things sounded new: an anecdote about poison cookies being sent to the justices and very pointed criticism about Texas’ election of judges.
 
I wrote a column focusing on Texas’ judicial selection system but incorporating the poison cookies story, which I hadn’t heard before.

When my column appeared on Nov. 16, I sent it to a legal blog, www.howappealing.com, run by a Philadelphia lawyer, Howard Bashman, who posted it that day.

Next thing I know, the Drudge Report has linked to my column.

Linda Greenhouse of The New York Times writes a story detailing the conviction of the poison cookie sender. It turns out the woman was sentenced to prison in October. The NYT credits the Star-Telegram with first reporting O’Connor’s revelation of the case.

My column also gets mentioned on another blog, Lawbeat, written by Mark Obbie at the Carnegie Legal Reporting Program at Syracuse’s Newhouse School of Public Communication.

By mid-morning on Nov. 17, Star-Telegram.com was approaching 80,000 hits on my column.  

Linda Campbell is an editorial writer and columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

GUEST BLOGGER

EDITOR'S NOTE: This is the first in an occasional series on developments in the news business, written by a guest blogger.

Maybe I’ve had this job too long, but to me, some supposedly important topics fall below the threshold of serious commentary. For example: Minnesota’s Democratic candidate for governor calls a reporter “nothing more than a Republican whore,” and while other observers start droning on about the candidate’s anger problems, my only thought was:  Is he so far ahead in the polls that he can throw away the Republican-whore vote?

It can be hard to get stuff like that into the editorial pages, although my boss has been amazingly game – like the time recently when some researchers concluded Minnesota had a drinking problem. I denounced their report in an editorial that wheeled through various stages of inebriation before finally losing consciousness in mid-sentence.

That’s the way my mind was working last spring during a session in the audio studios of our online operation, startribune.com. I was about to experiment with podcasting, and had cobbled together some riveting sounds of street scenes. One of the online editors listened politely to my traffic noises, and then played for me some of her own work – a fully produced, multitracked piece that might have been a story on public radio.

But I wasn’t thinking public radio so much as Firesign Theater. “You could have Graydon and me doing satire,” I said to the boss. (That’s Graydon Royce, one of our theater critics.)

Be careful what you say to the boss.

Now we’ve launched something we call “The Fifth Floor,” after a floor in our building that has no apparent function. Readers get to our site (http://www.startribune.com/10121) by going to the opinion page and pressing an elevator button. Once there, they find little sketches and screeds, either by us or by one of the outside contributors we’ve recruited. We post new episodes at least once a week, and more often when we spot fat, easy prey.

If I had to offer a serious explanation for why we're doing this: First, it's fun, for the readers and for us. Second, we're doing it because we can  -- and we should be thinking creatively about how to use the technology we have. Third, listeners, as opposed to readers, seem to get the joke -- and I'm bone-weary of having to explain satire to readers who don't get it (and no, I won't hang a "satire" label on it, which will kill a joke faster and deader than John Kerry ever did). "No, ma'am, the writer wasn't serious when she warned that terrorists would be eating our meatloaf." I mean, really.

Eric Ringham is Commentary editor of  the Star Tribune in Minneapolis.

AIRING THEIR VIEWS

Commentators for The Writers Group have a long history of appearing on television and radio to analyze political events, and that tradition will continue Tuesday evening as the midterm election results come in.

George F. Will can be seen on ABC

Eugene Robinson will be on MSNBC.

E.J. Dionne Jr. can be heard on National Public Radio.

Ruben Navarrette Jr. will be doing radio on the BBC.

Don't forget to vote before you tune in.

BOOKS OF NOTICE: Color of Money columnist Michelle Singletary's second book, "Your Money and Your Man," is a finalist in the personal finance category for the 2006 Books for a Better Life awards.

A former Writers Group fixture, Jane Bryant Quinn, is also a finalist in the same category for "Straight and Simple Financial Strategies for Busy People."

Congratulations to both.

James Hill is managing editor of The Washington Post Writers Group.

JUDGMENT CALLS

Political campaigns always produce their moments of supreme absurdity, sometimes worth a good laugh but most often supersized outrage.

John Kerry and Rush Limbaugh certainly got the outrage Richter meters jumping in the closing weeks of this year's midterm campaign. Yet step back from "the Freak Show" -- as defined by Mark Halperin and John F. Harris in their much talked-about new book, "The Way to Win: Taking the White House in 2008" -- and consider what a skilled commentator must contemplate when assessing the impact of political absurdity: In other words, the big picture.

Readers of the Drudge Report may have been shocked, shocked to discover last week that Virginia Senate candidate Jim Webb had included some salacious sex scenes in his much-heralded novels. But at this point in a race with incumbent George Allen that is coming close to setting a standard for political mud wrestling, the fact that Webb had been a little randy as a novelist didn't quite answer the greater question: What does it all mean?

Enter George Will. In what has to be one of the most devastating paragraphs of commentary directed by a conservative commentator toward a conservative candidate, Will let Allen have it for resorting to such a low October surprise.

"But Allen, who makes no secret of finding life as a senator tedious, is fighting ferociously for another term, a fate from which his Democratic opponent, Jim Webb, is close to rescuing him," Will wrote in this column. "As a result, Allen is dabbling in literary criticism. He has read, or someone has read for him, at least some of Webb's six fine novels, finding therein sexual passages that have caused Allen -- he of the football metaphors, cowboy regalia and Copenhagen smokeless tobacco -- to blush like a fictional Victorian maiden and fulminate like an actual Victorian man, Anthony Comstock, the 19th-century scourge of sin who successfully agitated for New York and federal anti-obscenity statutes and is credited with the destruction of 160 tons of naughty printed matter and pictures."

Will's big-picture conclusion? Even should Allen win re-election Tuesday, his shoot-yourself-in-the-foot campaign takes him out of serious consideration for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008 and opens the door wide for Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney.

Out of a campaign's moments of supreme absurdity such interesting judgments are made.

James Hill is managing editor of The Washington Post Writers Group.