A New Guilty Pleasure.

Just as the whole crisis with Putin's little incursion into Ukraine (you know, the one where he's holding all the cards and asking us if we want to say something about it) is finally getting beyond out of hand, I was delighted today to discover what may be my newest guilty pleasure: Mark Leibovich, author of last year's epic dish-out on inside Washington, This Town, has a new regular column for The New York Times (the first reason for me to actually regularly visit The Times since the departure of Nate Silver), which I am happy to report is written very much in the same style as his book. His first target? Possibly the most "This Town" race in America, in a place about as far from "This Town" as possible: the race for Senate in Kentucky. The highlights are fantastic:

"McConnell and Grimes may be the main combatants, but the front lines of affront in this Bluegrass State battle are occupied by the competing spokeswomen, Norton and Cooper. They brim with enthusiasm for their jobs, their candidates and their country. But perhaps more important, they are fluent in the lingua franca of chagrin, and eager to share with us — via clinically composed news release, email, tweet or whatever — how deeply troubled and appalled they are by something their opponent did, didn’t do or might possibly be associated with...

Not long ago, the privilege of speaking publicly on behalf of a candidate belonged to a select few operatives, usually 40- and 50-somethings who spoke with deliberate authority and, in the case of Senate races, often had deep ties to the candidates, the state and political reporters. Things have changed. Norton and Cooper, 25 and 23 respectively, are typical of young political operatives at work today. Each speaks with a Southern accent, though neither is from the South, let alone Kentucky. When this race is settled, there’s a good chance each will turn up working for another candidate somewhere else, condemning the dishonest attacks of their opponents, demanding apologies that will never come and telling us what the people of said state are sick and tired of. The job now requires no special education or experience, no roots to a state and no affiliation with a candidate. The prized skill set is merely the ability to get your noise heard above the rest of the cacophony, which, of course, just creates more noise...compared with even five years ago, political races now exist fully in an anarchic hyperspace that creates a synergy of desperation between the feeders and the beasts. “Sometimes I would put out a bunch of press releases, and some reporter will call and say, ‘You know the other guys are putting out more stuff,’ ” says Brian Walsh, a former spokesman for the National Republican Senatorial Committee. The media, Walsh says, is as invested in the game of back and forth as the actual campaigns are “even though we all laugh at the cheesiness,” he says...

If you were stuck, for example, in one of those bladder-bursting traffic jams on the George Washington Bridge, you may not have been wondering if your misery was feeding into Chris Christie’s problematic “bullying narrative.” But his ability to navigate a public-relations crisis became the prevailing data point."

Read the full piece, “Fake Outrage in the Kentucky Senate Race,” here.