Hurricane Ike

As many Houston area residents have found, it is difficult to keep up a blog without electircal power. It is also difficult to keep up on national political news. For two or three days after the storm hit, all the local news outlets focused almost exclusively on hurricane news. For eleven days after Ike hit my primary contact with the outside world was a little battery operated AM radio. As the local stations returned to their normal broadcasting schedules, I gained an increased apprectiation of the role talk radio has come to play in our political process. The overwhelming number of shows I ran across were right of center in their political orientation. Like blogs, there are no editors to fact check the assertions the hosts of these shows make or their listeners. When liberals complain of the conservative bias of talk radio, the response given is that there is a much greater market for conservative talk shows than there is for liberal talk shows. The political influence of people like Rush Limbaugh raises the same sorts of questions about establishing a fair playing field that questions about campaign contributions raise. A candidate who has twice as much money to sepnd than his opponent certainly has an electoral advantage, all other things being equal. Similarly, a candidate who is getting the active support of three or four times as many talk show hosts as his competitor also has an advantage. Money is an extremely important resource in politics but but the only one . . . unions or churches who can turn out their members to work in campaigns, celebrities who help candidates attract large crowds to their rallies, favorable coverage in the print media, guest appearances on late-night TV - all of these things can be of real benefit to a candidate. I am really not sure what the minimum requirements for fairness in an election are - - I suspect that it is nearly impossible for any of us to be fully objective about what constitute a "fair playing field" for an election. So far in thise election, my sense is that the different advantages of the two major presidential pretty much balance one another out. Of course my opinion may change about the fairness of this election if my candidate loses:-)