Consumer Tip: Pack Paper Cups

Another election season dawns …

One thing you learn from covering campaigns is to be pretty, uh, flexible in your travel expectations. In the last cycle, there was the hotel that the Dean campaign stayed in in South Carolina where the breakfast buffet featured … Twinkies. And the one in Dubuque where the Kerry campaign dumped the press in the middle of the night; the first thing we noticed, even in our sleep-deprived state, was that the front desk was behind bulletproof glass.

When you are spending three weeks on the road in a different city every night, you look forward to the hotel that offers overnight laundry services. I learned the hard way not to trust them, when one in Washington lost every stitch of clothing I had with me, except for what I was wearing (which, at the time, happened to be my pajamas). And when you hear the Secret Service agents have made arrangements for alternate accommodations for their traveling detail–well, let’s just say it’s not a good sign.

But even for me, this report was a real eye-opener (Here’s a link, if you have trouble with the video):

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    Alec MacGillis of the NewRepublic has been doing some fine campaign reporting this year and here he offers a smart look at what may be the most important state of all in November–Ohio. The most striking part of the piece for me, one that illuminates an essential conundrum for Barack Obama, occurs when MacGillis goes door to door with a labor-affiliated political organizer in a white working-class neighborhood in Columbus:

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