Who's tweaking whom?
I have come to believe that the nearly daily back and forth between the White House and Fox News is good for both sides. I have further come to believe it's good for the political class in general. For one thing, the fight is deeply self-referential and true inside baseball (who is doing what to whom on the basis of what strategy and what future benefit); for another it sets up the ultimate liberal-conservative face-off. In one corner the new young president (with all his promises of bipartisanship) and in the other Fox Chief Roger Ailes, that dark figure who has been bending media to the conservative cause since the Nixon administration.
Politico, the arbiter of political baseball, floated the rumor on Friday that "friends and associates" were encouraging Ailes to run for president in 2012.
Before getting to my relative affection for Ailes, let me note that he will be 73 in 2012; he's vastly overweight (and sensitive about it); he has health problems and can't walk very well; he's ghoulish looking; he's deeply and nuttily paranoid (he discusses freely, albeit in lowered voice, the plans of radical Muslims to storm his house in New Jersey); and he may not be capable of doing 15 minutes without an offensive utterance.
Suffice it to say that nobody is encouraging Ailes to run for president.
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