At the top of the 3:00PM EST hour of live coverage on MSNBC, anchor Norah O’Donnell and Politico executive editor Jim VandeHei were practically tripping over themselves declaring Barack Obama the "rock star" of Europe in the wake of the G-20 summit. O’Donnell began by asking: "Can we gauge this meeting as a success?" VandeHei replied: "I think early indications are it probably was a big success...I think they'll hail that as a big success. I think the fact that he's just been greeted like such a hero overseas...and I think that that press conference will probably get a pretty good reception." O’Donnell agreed: "You're right, it was sort of like rock star treatment...I mean, you could even see it from some of the international press there at that press conference that we just watched for the past hour...Of course, there was the Obama-mania out there..."

Later, O’Donnell compared Obama to Bush: "...there's also a turning point in terms of a break with this administration and the last administration. And Bush foreign policy. The President, today, talked about the old ways of Washington...How much of this was a clean break with the Bush Administration and that type of foreign policy?" VandeHei then won the contest over who could praise Obama more: "Oh, I think that the campaign through now, it's all been a clean break... Norah, as you well know, Obama could have gone and sat in his hotel room and listened to his ipod and he still would have been greeted with more cheer in Europe than President Bush would. So that's not a hard hurdle to clear. Because Bush was so unpopular overseas and Obama is a rock star overseas, in some places even more so than here. So that part was an easy slam dunk for him."

In a story on President-elect Barack Obama's Monday meeting with Senator John McCain, CBS's Dean Reynolds listed some “areas of potential cooperation,” but he worried: “Will it be McCain the bipartisan maverick who reemerges in the Senate or the campaign conservative who might want to join fellow Republicans in frustrating the new President's plans?”

Reynolds then turned to the Politico's Jim VandeHei, a veteran of the Washington Post, who assured viewers McCain will want to “fix any damage that he did during this campaign” -- presumably a reference to McCain going to the right -- by returning to his old Senate ways journalists liked: “This is a man with a very rich appreciation for history and his place in history and I think he'll want to, you know, fix any damage that he did during this campaign by ending on a high note in the Senate.”

President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton = “breathtaking!” Meanwhile, in Jake Tapper's Monday night story on ABC's World News about speculation over Hillary Clinton getting a cabinet spot, Clintonista Lanny Davis hailed: “The combination of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton on the world stage is literally breathtaking!”

John F. Harris and Jim VandeHei were important players on The Washington Post’s political team when they left to start The Politico newspaper and website. But they don’t think that most "mainstream" reporters are liberals or partisans. Now they’ve written an article provocatively titled "Why McCain Is Getting Hosed by the Press," noting their own mothers think the media’s in the tank for Obama.

Harris and VandeHei declared: "OK, let’s just get this over with: Yes, in the closing weeks of this election, John McCain and Sarah Palin are getting hosed in the press, and at Politico." But to critics, they can only say: "our sincere answer is that of the factors driving coverage of this election -- and making it less enjoyable for McCain to read his daily clip file than for Obama -- ideological favoritism ranks virtually nil."

They proclaimed that reporters are far too professional to let their personality show:

One or more people hack Sarah Palin's email account and publish her private correspondence on the web.  So MSNBC and Politico naturally want to know if. . . Palin did anything wrong and whether there might be anything embarrassing to her in the purloined e-letters.  Discussion of possible negative implications for Barack Obama? Zilch.

Talk about blaming the victim.  Norah O'Donnell, subbing for Andrea Mitchell during MSNBC's 1PM EDT hour, interviewed Politico's Jim VandeHei.

View video here.

The Politico, in an April 18 headline, stated the obvious "Obama’s secret weapon: The media," though it’s not much of a "secret" weapon. John F. Harris and Jim Vandehei noted the backlash against ABC for daring to ask the tough questions, and many mainstream journalists rallying behind Obama after the debate.

"Last fall, when NBC’s Tim Russert hazed Clinton with a bunch of similar questions — a mix of fair and impertinent — he got lots of gripes from Clinton supporters.

"But there was nothing like the piling on from journalists rushing to validate the Obama criticisms and denouncing ABC’s performance as journalistically unsound."

John Harris, formerly of the Washington Post, called for many journalists to "go through detox, to cure their swooning over Obama’s political skill" and noted even co-writer Jim Vandehei "seemed to have been bitten by the bug after the Iowa caucus." Vandehei admitted he found Obama to be "pretty electric myself."

Republicans held a debate on Sunday, but CBS’s Hannah Storm seemed more interested in Rudy Giuliani’s personal life and then Mitt Romney’s crankiness. On the August 6 edition of "The Early Show," at 7:19 AM, Storm kicked off the segment noting there was a Republican debate the previous day but, "they did not talk about an issue hanging over front-runner Rudy Giuliani and that is his wife, Judith, who has become a controversial topic in his campaign."

Washington Post political reporter Jim VandeHei did the Post website's daily politics chat, and the most interesting thing to draw from it is that a) the Democrats want to build their strategy around the Abramoff scandal, and b) coincidentally or not, the Post reporter thinks Abramoff-gate is a "huge deal."

A questioner from New Madrid, Missouri asked:

My question, why are the Democrats not raising more of an outcry about the spying and the Abramoff scandal?

Jim VandeHei: ...I think democrats are making a big deal out of both issues. There is some hesitation about taking Bush on politically over the spying program, but not on the policy. Democrats are basically building their election strategy on the Abramoff scandal.

As Brent Bozell has written, it seems bizarre to conservatives to think Democrats are going to run against a "culture of corruption" when they have been engaged in so much of it in recent history. It may be quite a challenge for Republicans to run against the Democrats on this when the reporters want to pretend to have massive attacks of amnesia on the Clintons, and so on back through the 1990s and 1980s. But the questions got weirder. Apparently, they're hoping a mob-style murder could really make for a big national GOP scandal: 

Peter Baker and Jim VandeHei of the Washington Post pulled no punches in their front-page article this morning about the challenges currently facing President Bush:

“Rarely has a president confronted as many damaging developments that could all come to a head in this week. A special counsel appears poised to indict one or more administration officials within days. Pressure is building on Bush from within his own party to withdraw the faltering Supreme Court nomination of Harriet Miers. And any day the death toll of U.S. troops in Iraq will pass the symbolically important 2,000 mark.”

Rarely?  I guess 9/11 doesn't count, for regardless of what happens this week, it’s got to be a cakewalk by comparison to the days following the first attacks on this country since Pearl Harbor.

They continued:

The mainstream press does not always blame only Republicans or conservatives. There's a tendency in some quarters to believe that, but it's not true. What is true, however, is that the tendency to blame or criticize Republicans and/or conservatives is much, much stronger than the tendency to blame Democrats and/or liberals. This fact manifests itself in a couple of different ways. The first thing that happens is that a Democrat can get away with things that a Republican just can't. Trent Lott, for example, made an offhand remark at a birthday party for Strom Thurmond that could be read as racist, and the outcry was immediate and widespread. When Richard Durbin went to the floor of the Senate to make comments that were far more inflammatory and inappropriate, comparing the US military to Nazis and genocidal Cambodian dictators, there was no coverage at all for several days, and the little coverage it eventually got didn't compare to what Lott got. The other thing that happens is that Democratic follies and foibles tend to get grouped with others by Republicans, and presented in "everybody does it" arguments. I've said for years that there are three mainstream blame assessment scenarios: if the Republicans are wrong, they get blamed; if both parties are wrong, the Republicans get blamed; and if the Democrats are wrong, both parties get blamed.

Perhaps an attempt to reignite the media firestorm over Karl Rove, a front page story in Thursday's Washington Post based on a secret June 2003 State Department memo "central" to the Valerie Plame leak investigation and leaked to staff writers Walter Pincus and Jim VandeHei was given a misleading headline which prompts readers into thinking Valerie Plame's was widely known in the Bush administration as that of a covert CIA agent. For a government official such as Karl Rove to knowingly reveal the name of a covert agent is the crime which lies at the heart of the grand jury inquiry into the matter, and at the heart of liberal media interest in the story. A slightly more accurate but still misleading headline was posted on the Post's home page, though not the actual Web version of the article, which correctly notes that the memo was marked secret, not Plame's name.