Here's a modest proposal to improve the Democratic convention: Let Oprah host the whole shebang instead of giving her just a drop-in appearance.
That way you get better ratings, more network airtime, and an overall sweeter tone.
Which would be a big improvement over the current situation, in which the Democrats can seemingly do nothing right. It certainly seems that way if you watch the cable news channels, which have painted the event in Denver in bilious tones all week long.
Of course that's what happens when you have an army of analysts, experts and advocates, sitting with their knives sharpened, eager for face time.
Goldilocks wasn't this picky.
The morning after Hillary Clinton's ringing speech, for instance, on MSNBC's Morning Joe, the rheumy Irish gang of Mike Murphy, Pat Buchanan and Mike Barnicle was carping that it wasn't "a personal endorsement" of Barack Obama.
Again and again the telepundits demanded that the Democratic speakers address a wide array of talking points. And then they criticized them for being, in Campbell Brown's word, "unfocused."
There's just no pleasing the cable crowd. As soon as something happens in the Pepsi Center, they're against it.
Sometimes they don't even wait for it to happen. Two hours before Hillary took the stage, CNN's Gloria Borger presented a Republican "prebuttal" to her speech.
Welcome to the frantic, ravening world of 24-hour cable news channels, besieging the convention in Colorado like a blanket of army ants, devouring everything in their path.
On The O'Reilly Factor Tuesday, Karl Rove was marveling at how insane the pace of cable news has grown. He recalled that when he was first guiding George Bush's presidential campaign, it took about 12 hours for a story to develop, be debated and explored, and then supplanted. Now he estimated that cycle is down to about an hour.
Chew 'em up and spit 'em out.
The most dyspeptic take on the convention was predictably delivered by Fox News, which gleefully covered radical fringe groups such as Recreate '68 mobilizing in Denver. Fox's minions also fanned the flames of the rumor that Obama was suspending the traditional roll call, thus denying Hillary her moment in history. And the channel repeatedly showed McCain attack ads in their entirety, couching them not as paid programming but as valid news items. Fair and balanced? Surely you jest.
