That is sort of a shame. The Palin thing is the most heavily over-covered story line of the entire 2008 campaign, so focusing on it might be totally logical from a marketing perspective, but it's unfortunate from an artistic one. The film re-creates various moments of YouTube campaign ephemera very well -- remember when that old white lady called Obama an Arab and McCain looked uncomfortable? When it takes us behind closed doors, it's to witness scenes any moderately close observer of the election and its aftermath could've dreamed up him- or herself. It might have been fun to see a TV movie about the Democratic primary fight; the personality clashes of the disastrous Clinton campaign would have made for entertaining television, and Mark Penn is surely a creature crying out for a grotesque Emmy-winning portrayal by, say, Paul Giamatti.

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Oddly enough, Strong began his entertainment career playing key roles in cult series – Jonathan Levinson on “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”; Paris’ boyfriend on “Gilmore Girls”; the hopeful copywriter hired after Don Draper stole his idea on “Mad Men.” We caught up with him in Atlanta last week.

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Everyone already knows everything about that election. It will be fun, I guess, to watch famous people pretend to be other famous people. For a while. But that particular pleasure usually wears off about three minutes into your average "SNL" political cold open. And we are all already intimately familiar with nearly everything our dramatis personae will do and say.

I, for one, would rather watch a film dramatizing the 1948 election. Or 1876! Almost any close election that happened prior to the age of 24-hour cable news and blogs would be infinitely more interesting to watch unfold on television than the one everyone in the nation just sat through.

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With so many guesses, you would have thought somebody would have hit on award-winner Julianne Moore to play the Alaskan governor, since according to a Deadline Hollywood bulletin from today, that's who the producers are going with.

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I refer to the ubiquitous publicity attending the release of Mark Halperin and John Heilemann's book "Game Change," reportedly an insider account of the 2008 presidential campaign by the largely anonymous aides and consultants who lost it. Observing virtually the entire "Gang of 500" -- as Halperin's clubby Internet rumor sheet The Note calls its audience -- going ape over the fool thing you could almost hear them emit an audible sigh of relief.

Enough tedium about healthcare, jobs, taxes, financial regulation and foreign affairs. Back to what really matters to these fops and courtiers: what Newsweek's Howard Fineman called "tweetable nuggets." As so often happens, Fineman speaks for them all: "A long analysis of the demographics of the electorate is not going to get you an HBO movie," he said. "But the tawdry psycho-drama of the Edwards's and a racist crack by Harry Reid will."

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Based on material fed to them by McCain campaign advisors and strategists, whose animus against Palin is no secret, authors Mark Halperin of Time and John Heilemann of New York magazine describe Palin as stunningly ignorant, lazy, dangerous -- and possibly nuts. According to them, she didn’t know the difference between World War I and World War II or North and South Korea.

Those anecdotes and adjectives probably reflect the ultimate assessment of the hockey mom by the men responsible for her nomination (which tells us as much about them as about her). But shouldn’t Heilemann and Halperin have given Palin the opportunity to rebut, or at least deny, the stupid things she is accused of saying? ("60 Minutes"  did.)

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On Sunday I wrote about the book's "revelation" that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid used the term "Negro dialect" referring to Barack Obama. I wrote then about my discomfort with the book's mostly anonymous sourcing – there is no index or source notes – as well as its strange practice of "quoting" inflammatory statements in mere sentence fragments, without full context, and Heilemann and Halperin's Bob Woodward-like zest for recreating thoughts and conversations they couldn't have been a party to. (I particularly enjoyed the opening scene, set in Obama's room at a Des Moines Hampton Inn just before the Iowa caucuses, when the candidate woke up anxious in the middle of the night, feeling like "the dog that caught the bus." Were they there? Now that's a story!) I have the book, and I'm making my way through it, but I'm surprised more people aren't asking the questions I have about it. And that's what I told Schultz, somewhat to his surprise.

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I am reading "Game Change" now and will update this entry once I've completed the portions about Hillary Clinton but I wanted to post something immediately in response to the Politico story.

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That's former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, talking to radio host Laura Ingraham about the new book "Game Change," in which former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee is quoted as saying, "I don't think Romney has a soul."

This isn't a religious argument, though Romney also made a joke about that; it's about the sense many observers have -- and apparently, many of his opponents as well -- that Romney's principles are very flexible and depend upon electoral politics.

(Hat-tip to Hotline On Call.)

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It was, to put it mildly, something of an awkward spectacle. Reid was just quoted as describing Obama as "light-skinned" and praising him for having "no Negro dialect, unless he want[s] to have one." And Monday, at the press conference, he was trying to fix that apparently self-inflicted wound by saying, "First of all, I am very proud that [I was] if not the first, one of the first people to suggest that Barack Obama run for president. I'm very happy about that."

Reid also spent some time name-dropping prominent people of color whom, he says, have expressed their support.

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Democrats don't want to let the Senate majority leader's inanely phrased musings about why President Obama would appeal to white voters (his light skin and his lack of "Negro dialect," as you've surely heard by now) become any more of a vulnerability for Reid than they already have been. A new poll in Nevada before the quotes came out showed Reid trailing any of his Republican challengers and rated favorably by only 33 percent of voters. Moving quickly past the comments, in "Game Change," a new book on the 2008 election, could be a matter of political survival for him.

So as the GOP works itself up into ever-higher dudgeon about Reid's remarks, Democrats are pushing back, aggressively, against his critics. "One thing he's not going to do is allow Republicans like John Cornyn and Jon Kyl to beat him up over this," said one source close to Reid's camp. "You take John Cornyn and Jon Kyl's NAACP ratings, add them together, spot 'em 20 points and it still wouldn't come close to Reid's."

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But politics aside—if that is allowed—I was most concerned about the flip way that many commentators dismissed the Reid statement as unimportant. There is a reason why so many people were put off by his statements. I think that his words tap into a very old history shaped around questions of color and respectability and its meaning in American politics.

As historian, this debate makes me think of older arguments about African American citizenship. During Reconstruction there were well-meaning people who debated whether or not the freed slaves were ready for citizenship. Perhaps they needed more time, more education. By the turn of the twentieth century, black citizenship was being systematically destroyed by disfranchisement, lynching, and racial segregation. African Americans had made dramatic gains in education, and yet their opportunities were eroding. Many had banked on respectability as a political tool and were left disappointed.

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But 70-year-old Harry Reid's gaffe -- he immediately apologized once it was revealed in John Heilemann and Mark Halperin's gossipy "Game Change," and Obama warmly accepted the apology -- has attained near-scandal proportion, pumped up by the right, the shallow MSM as well as a little bit too much debate among Democrats. I dug myself into a hole on this question on Twitter; it can't be debated in 140 characters, so let me try to dig out -- or dig deeper -- with a little more room here.

First of all, I'll share what Reid is quoted as saying. Tangent: I think Heileman and Halperin have probably written an absorbing book (the John Edwards chapter is amazing, and stomach-turning), but if they get dinged for anything, it will be for using a lot of unnamed sources, as well as quoting controversial statements, sometimes firsthand, sometimes with less direct knowledge, in odd sentence fragments. Here's the Reid section:

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GOP Chairman Michael Steele says if a Republican had made such remarks, Democrats would be calling for that Republican's head.

In a private conversation reported in a new book, Reid described Obama as a "light-skinned" African-American "with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one."

Reid has apologized to Obama, and the president said he considers the episode closed.

Democratic Party chairman Tim Kaine says the remarks should not affect Reid's leadership position.

Steele and Kaine spoke on "Fox News Sunday."

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The big detail from the book that's gotten attention this week is a story about Sarah Palin and her preparation for the vice-presidential debate, against Joe Biden. The press release for the "60 Minutes" story -- published on Drudge, who got the book and this story covered elsewhere as a result -- tells the story this way:

Palin had a reflexive tendency to refer to Biden as “O’Biden,” says [Steve Schmidt, former chief campaign strategist for John McCain], something that had to be fixed before the debate. He says others in the campaign came up with a solution. “It was multiple people -- and I wasn't one of them-- who all said at the same time, ‘Just say, Can I call you Joe,’ which she did.” Schmidt says he took over the prepping, simplified it, and says she “more than held her own” in the debate. But not without one “O’Biden” slip on national television.

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