One of the best things about watching the Olympics is how we all become experts in sports we know absolutely nothing about. “She added all those elements to her routine and totally stuck her dismount and you gave her a 14.8?!” That and those Chinese girls who they swear are 16 — according to who? Roman Polanski?

But the Olympics are also supposed to be a time to set political differences aside. Which is why the Russians waited until opening day to invade Georgia. To his credit, Bush expressed his displeasure forcefully, and in person (does he still see Putin’s soul in his eyes? is it starting to look like that picture of Dorian Gray?) and took a few opportunities to publicly criticize the Chinese, too. Did you see his interview with Bob Costas? That’s about the most relaxed and articulate I’ve ever seen the president. The prospect of unemployment must agree with him. That and the wall-to-wall sports. 

There was a touching moment when the Georgian and Russian women who medaled in an air-pistol event exchanged kisses, with Georgian Nino Salukvadze saying, “We shouldn’t stoop so low to wage wars against each other.” (You didn’t see it because it was an air-pistol event, which as a TV sport is right up there with snipe hunting.) While the press focused on the silver and bronze winners sharing a moment on the podium, I couldn’t help but notice the Chinese winner in the middle, waving her medal: “Peaceable kingdom, shee-it — I got the gold, bitches!”

But the most touching example of international diplomacy came last night, when the US swim relay team beat the French (a statistical improbability like unto finding water on Mars, according to the NBC color man) and then brayed like big time wrestlers while the French closer actually cried. Not that there is anything wrong with crying, or being French. But this frog had actually had the temerity to say they would “smash” the US team. Sorry, Frenchy. We’re the smashers here. Just ask The Decider, or his friend, Old Soul Eyes.

It was good to see the major New York papers giving the story of John Edwards’s mistress the coverage it deserved this morning. It made the front page of the Times, the Daily News and the Post (“He’s a Lyin’ Cheatin’ No-Good Hypocrite!” — not a quote, mind you, but a statement of editorial opinion) while the Wall Street Journal merely teased the story on the front page (you had to turn to A3 to get the dish). It made me think all was right with the world (now that he went public on ABC Nightline, trying to have it both ways by admitting to the sin of arrogance while implying he wasn’t so bad because his wife was in remission when he started fooling around) and it answered the netizens who complained that mainstream media was being irresponsible not investigating the affair before.

Now begins the long climb to redemption for the man who would be president if not a champion of the poor. First he’ll have to reach the requisite level of truthiness that others are demanding of him (with the questions turning from “did you shag her?” to “how long have you been shagging her?”) and then come up with some kind of public role for himself — but he had to do that anyway. He can look to the example of Bill Clinton, who went from denial to tortured, albeit half-assed admission — and hopefully do it better. 

Watching David Carr make the rounds of TV interviews and magazine features, all in the name of promoting his crack-head-turned-crack-reporter memoir, The Night of the Gun, I have felt he was making his own amends, redeeming himself in the public eye but also allowing us to forget the example of James Frey, whose story of addiction and imprisonment turned out to be a million little pieces of baloney. 

Carr mentioned the Frey fiasco in his interview on the Colbert Report and has used it to explain why he videotaped his “sources” — former friends and family members — about his darkest days. No one wants an act of public self-redemption to turn into the kind of spankfest Frey got from Mother Winfrey. It was especially instructive to see him slip out of the trap so many of Colbert’s guests fall into. Since Stephen Colbert plays a character named Stephen Colbert, savvy guests tend to either dismiss his tack as an act, or treat him as if he were real. 

When Colbert, in his right-leaning, O’Reilly Factor mode, opened with a zinger — “You are a former crack addict, and you are a reporter for the New York Times. Which of these two do you think is more damaging to society?” — Carr did not slip. “I don’t think that’s a tough call,” he said. “Journalism, if it’s practiced appropriately, is a civic good… Using crack cocaine is an idiotic activity that will eventually result in mania and death.”

Telling the truth is always easier when you don’t have to think about which truth to tell. 

While it seems early in the race to be talking about, uh, race, the damage has been done: McCain’s campaign manager, Rick Davis, accused Obama of playing the race card by mentioning that he doesn’t look like the presidents on the dollar bills (green) and the response of the presumptive Democratic candidate has been somewhat muted. 

“The instinctive urge to punch back was tempered by the fact that race is a fire that could singe both candidates,”  the New York Times reported this morning, which makes me worry. It wasn’t too long ago that Obama was invoking Sean Connery’s speech to Kevin Costner in The Untouchables: “They pull a knife, you pull a gun. They send one of yours to the hospital, you send one of theirs to the morgue.” That, he says, is “the Chicago way.”

Obama’s missing years — those the least reported about in the media, and given the least inspection in the press — were in the state legislature of Illinois, and longtime watchers of that august body say dirty pool is the default mode, and they like it that way. (This kind of hardball is a matter of native pride and legend:It was Chicago’s own David Mamet who wrote Connery’s speech.) He can fight dirty, they insist, not skip Bambi-like through the forest singing of change. It may be time for the candidate to get in touch with his inner thug, to pull that gun he was talking about. May I suggest some bullets?

He can’t brand McCain old & white when that is so much of the Arizona senator’s own campaign strategy, but what about making more of the fact that the man has flip-flopped on nearly every major issue, from the Bush tax cuts for the rich to off-shore drilling? (This accusation helped smear Kerry in the last election.) When he has been consistent he has mostly been wrong, as in his support of the Iraq war — a three trillion dollar fiasco that has not made us one bit safer — and his tired belief that the Vietnam war was just and should have been won. He’s opposed to abortion and will pack the Supreme Court with justices who feel the same; he has abandoned the immigrants whose cause he once triumphed; and his missus is a scary Stepford Wife who eats live kittens. (I made that last part up.)

The trap, of course, is that Obama is supposed to be a different kind of candidate, one who doesn’t need to sink to that Karl Rove like level of mud-slinging and innuendo. But he does. The Republicans’ willingness to go so low so early in the game is a sure sign that they know they’ve got nothing, and that any rational weighing of the choice this fall will send voters away from the tired policies of the last eight years, most of which McCain seems just fine with. But rational doesn’t have much to do with it come voting time. Some people want to know how Obama, our potential commander-in-chief, responds when attacked. Now is the time to show them, Chicago-style.

The sum wisdom of the political pundits I have seen, heard and read over the last week reacting to Obama’s trip to Europe and the Middle East seems to be that it was a wash. Yeah, he got to look presidential in front of all kinds of adoring Germans (though leave it Charles Krauthammer to make a Hitler comparison) and those pictures of him with Olmert, al-Maliki, Sarkozy and the fighting men and women he played basketball with will make for nice photos in a campaign montage come September. But meanwhile, back in the states, people were still freaking out about the economy and McCain was mocking his every move. It’s like coming back from a long vacation, only to have your resentful coworkers dump everything they can on your desk. 

John Kerry could be the first to tell him that people don’t care what they think of you in France. (The fact that Kerry was fluent in French was something some voters actually held against him, and I noted with interest Obama’s admission that he doesn’t speak any foreign language.) And that Brother from Another Planet routine that some people (like me) find so compelling may be too cool for school. One of the reasons I was drawn to the candidate was because he is cool under pressure; he makes me think of Joe Montana or Michael Jordan, great athletes who kept their heads while all about them were headed for the exits. I want a president who’s cool under pressure, and so should you; but voters also want one with a pulse. I suspect his resting heart rate is better than Lance Armstrong’s.

The danger of playing the wise extraterrestrial is that voters may confuse him with Mr. Spock. By remaining rational and unflappable, they’ll start to think he’s…different than them, with all the code implied by that adjective. It doesn’t concern me when polls suggest that voters can’t relate to his personal history: who the hell could? But he does need to find a way to keep consistently reminding people of his common bonds with them: his faith, his family, his struggles, and his losses (his father’s disappearance, his mother’s death). Because as popular as the character was, nobody wanted Spock to run the Enterprise. They wanted Capt. Kirk: flawed, human, but right most of the time. 

Of course, if Obama’s Spock then McCain has got to be Bones: always blowing a gasket over something, imagining slights and assumptions at every turn (“Dammit, Jim, I’m a senator not an economist!”). Personally, I think Obama is missing an opportunity not appearing on stage with McCain now, before the conventions. Network news and the major newspapers seem to be giving the Arizona senator a free ride, ignoring his daily gaffes and occasional outbursts. Seeing him go off like a string of firecrackers on a national stage might make some undecided voters think twice about how hot they want their next president to be.

Maybe Obama will bury the hatchet with Bill Clinton before the race is through and get some pointers; now there’s a man who could do empathy! There was a moment in one of the ’92 presidential debates that historians point to when discussing his rise to the White House: a woman asks a question about the recession and the national debt and Bush I says something about stimulating the economy. Clinton walked to the edge of crowd and asks her, “Tell me how it’s affected you, again?” He looked like the soul of compassion next to Pappy, just as Obama still might when reaching out to some mortal while standing next to a sputtering roman candle. 

The New York Times reports this morning that McCain’s people have taken to calling their opponent “The One.” And not in a nice way. After complaining about the press’s coverage of Obama’s trip abroad, McCain adviser and speechwriter Mark Salter said, “There is nothing you can do about it. ‘The One’ went to Europe and attention must be paid.”

It’s a double-bind for McCain. He was the one who kept nagging Obama about going to Iraq and Afghanistan to see “conditions on the ground,” and now that he’s gone and done that, and the prime minister of Iraq has made it clear he agrees with the Democrat’s 16-month withdrawal timetable and US troops have cheered his arrival, McCain can only sputter. There may yet be fallout from Obama’s meetings (last night the talking heads of cable news were already starting to cluck about the Dems’ presumptive nominee being presumptuously presidential in talking about his meetings with al-Maliki and other heads of state) but I find it amusing that they are trying to damn their opponent by labeling him the Messiah.

In the Matrix movies Keanu Reeves played Neo, whose name is an anagram for One, as in The One, as in the hero who would awaken from a machine-induced slumber and lead the people of the future to overthrow the robots that were using them like AA batteries. Despite its disappointing sequels (and the very notion that Keanu Reeves might be our saviour — he played the Buddha once, too, meaning Hollywood’s concept of enlightenment is literally half-baked) The Matrix worked because it drew on the universal spiritual idea of awakening and, yes, The One who can show you how it’s done. (The slo-mo bullet-dodging and Carrie-Anne Moss’s bondage outfits helped, too.)

Of course, Salter’s dig is just part of the Republican’s larger plaint: the media is smitten with Obama and ignoring their decent, honorable candidate. In an ad for an upcoming independent propaganda film entitled Hype: The Obama Effect Tucker Carlson sniffs, “The press loves Obama. I mean not just love but sort of like an early teenage crush.” (Carlson, a rapidly fading former conservative darling, should know about such crushes: his plan to become the next George Will — “I’ve got the bow tie!” — was snuffed when Jon Stewart famously bitch-slapped him on CNN’s now extinct Crossfire back in 2004. “You have a responsibility to the public discourse and you failed miserably” may have been the nicest thing the Daily Show host said to him.)

This tack, familiar to most kids with young siblings (“Stop paying attention to him! Look at me!”) didn’t work for Hillary and it won’t work for McCain. It’s like Perry Como complaining to Ed Sullivan that the Beatles get top billing because the kids think they’re so great. The press is smitten, okay — with a once-in-lifetime political story of a politician’s meteoric and seemingly unstoppable rise, and you can’t blame lifelong political reporters from covering this comet’s trajectory with some sense of wonder (if not One-der). McCain’s campaign needs a juju infusion, and quick, and putting Mitt Romney on the ticket ain’t going to do it. Maybe they’re hoping that the Tab Hunter of the GOP primaries will make McCain look more lifelike but without a messiah of their own, the Republicans are dead in November. Back to the desert, boys.