Don’t you hate it when this happens?

Having let my spam folder build up to more than 2,500 messages, I decided to delete them all without looking at them. Gmail has gotten much better at handling spam, so I thought I was safe. Naturally, as everything was in the process of disappearing, I saw a message from someone that was clearly personal and valid. Too late.

If you’ve e-mailed me during the past few weeks and I haven’t responded, my apologies. And please try again.

Explaining Dapper O’Neil

The Phoenix’s Peter Kadzis says farewell to former Boston city councilor Dapper O’Neil, who died earlier today.

Kadzis, who understands Boston’s neighborhood politics as well as anyone, manages the difficult task of explaining Dapper’s unique appeal while refraining from paying him tribute, writing that O’Neil “began his career as a political joke, and he ended it as a municipal embarrassment. But along the way, he won the affections of legions of blue-collar Bostonians by tirelessly defending their interests.”

Unlike, say, the late Jimmy Kelly, O’Neil did not grow in office. His nasty exterior masked a nasty interior. But I’m sure he was loyal to his friends and nice to his neighbors, and they’re entitled to miss him. No doubt Boston Herald columnist Howie Carr, who wrote a column about the ailing Tom Finneran today that was hateful even by Carr’s standards, is penning a tribute to the Dap even as we speak.

George Romney’s phantom march

Did George Romney ever march with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.? Romney’s son Mitt has said he did, most recently in what struck me as a pretty effective appearance on “Meet the Press” this past Sunday. But now David Bernstein of the Boston Phoenix reports there’s no evidence.

Follow-up: The Romney campaign appears to be taking the line that George Romney really did march with King, only not in the same city and not on the same day. Huh?

Catching up with the 2008 campaign

Because I no longer make my living by covering media and politics full-time, I’ve been less engaged in the 2008 presidential campaign than in any I can remember. So when I got a chance to head north on Monday to catch a Rudy Giuliani event, I leapt. My editor at the Guardian, Richard Adams, provided me with a letter in case I needed to produce credentials. And we were off.

My traveling companion was Seth Gitell, an old friend who’s covering presidential politics for the New York Sun. Gitell is probably best known for his stint as Boston Mayor Tom Menino’s spokesman, but before that he covered politics for the Boston Phoenix. He and I covered the Republican and Democratic national conventions together for the Phoenix in 2000, probably the most fun I’ve ever had in the news business.

We arrived at Goss International in Durham, N.H., where Giuliani was scheduled to speak, ridiculously early. The only evidence that we’d come to the right place was a lone campaign worker who was planting Giuliani signs in the snow. So we headed over to a coffee house near the University of New Hampshire campus to kill some time.

When we got back, the second-floor function room, next to the company cafeteria, was beginning to fill with reporters. It was a decent-size media crowd — not exactly what you’d call a horde, but respectable, especially given the consensus that Giuliani, despite leading in the national polls for months, was starting to see it slip away.

The media were kept at a distance. Giuliani was scheduled to speak at 12:45 p.m., but he didn’t arrive until about 1:15. What appeared to be several hundred Goss employees had filled the room, leading to a quip or two about whether they’d be allowed to extend their lunch break so that Rudy wouldn’t be speaking to an empty room. There were also a few jokes among reporters about the irony of covering an event at a company that manufactures printing presses, not exactly a growth industry these days.

Finally, Giuliani walked out onto the stage, wearing a black suit, a white shirt and a red striped tie — no soft tones for the Mayor of America. He made a lame joke about ink from Goss presses rubbing off on his hands, and then — moving back and forth in front of a sign that said “Tested. Ready. Now.” — spoke for about five minutes. Giuliani offered some free-market boilerplate about taxes and government regulation and, of course, revisited his favorite theme, “the terrorists’ war against us.” After that, he took questions from the employees — certainly not from the press — for about a half-hour.

Giuliani cuts an impressive figure on stage. He has a knack for coming off as conversational and informal while still managing to speak in complete sentences. Compared to the perpetually stiff John Kerry or the perpetually tongue-tied George W. Bush, he comes off well indeed. The content of what he said, though, seemed tired even to me — and I was seeing him in person for the first time. I can only imagine what it must have been like to be one of the reporters traveling with Giuliani, like Brian Mooney of the Boston Globe, who wrote a blog item on the event but nothing for the print edition.

Illegal immigration? Give legal immigrants “tamper-proof photo ID” cards. Public education? A school choice plan that would “empower parents” and, in particular, “empower poor parents.” Health insurance? “We need a private competitive market with millions of people in it, then costs will come down.” Someone even asked him to tell everyone about what 9/11 was like, a pitch so fat that you might have thought the questioner was a plant.

“There’s no way I can describe how difficult it was to get through the day,” Giuliani began before describing, in some detail, how difficult it was to get through the day.

I don’t mean to be quite as dismissive as this sounds. Giuliani is a smart, serious candidate with proven leadership qualities and a whole lot of personal baggage. He’s as interesting a story as there is in this campaign. But these town-meeting-style gatherings, safe and innocuous, don’t exactly give people what they need to know before walking into the voting booth.

For reporters who were present, the Giuliani story of the day was very different from what the candidate was talking about in front of the Goss employees. From the beginning of the campaign, Giuliani has pursued an odd strategy of hoping to do just well enough to get by in the early states of Iowa and New Hampshire while rolling to victory later, in big states like Florida, where voters are presumably more tolerant of a thrice-married moderate Republican. In pursuing this strategy, Giuliani has seemingly ignored the first rule of momentum: A lead in the national polls and in the big states tends to disappear overnight if you get creamed in Iowa and New Hampshire.

On Monday, the press was buzzing over news that Giuliani was cutting back on his advertising in New Hampshire. So a seeming throwaway line at the end of his talk — “I’ll be spending some of my Christmas holiday here in New Hampshire” — came across as at least somewhat significant. His New Hampshire campaign chairman, Wayne Semprini, reinforced that message afterwards, telling reporters, “Rudy Giuliani is not pulling out of New Hampshire.”

We milled around for a bit afterwards. Seth is a semi-regular on New England Cable News, and he did an interview with NECN’s Brad Puffer in which he said, “They [the Giuliani campaign] are still trying to have a foothold in New Hampshire and not abandon it. When you exclusively focus on a national campaign and don’t concentrate on Iowa and New Hampshire, then you may not get to have a national campaign.” (Seth’s piece for the Sun is here.)

David Saltonstall, a Massachusetts native and alumnus of the MetroWest Daily News who’s covering Giuliani for the New York Daily News, told me, “The news going into this news cycle is that Rudy’s withdrawing his ad dollars from New Hampshire.” Saltonstall saw Giuliani’s remarks as an attempt to have it both ways: “He’s walking kind of a tightrope with voters here, I think.”

All of this has precisely nothing to do with whether Giuliani would make a good president. Yet at this stage of the campaign, that’s what the media focus on — who’s up, who’s down, the polls, the fundraising. It’s not that the press never does substantive coverage (indeed, the Globe’s Mooney did a terrific profile of Giuliani in early November). It’s just that, late in the game, when ordinary voters finally start to tune in, the journalistic instinct is to cover the campaign as though it were a sporting event.

So let me indulge. Right now, on the Republican side, it looks as though Mitt Romney and John McCain have put themselves in the best position to win, assuming Mike Huckabee fades the way everyone thinks he will. Unless Giuliani can turn it around, he’ll be remembered as the winner of 2007 in an election that won’t be held until 2008. At least that’s what I wrote for the Guardian. (I gave Fred Thompson some props, too, so I may have been hallucinating at the time.)

Then again, who knows what will happen? It’s not as though anyone has actually voted yet.

A bad week for Chris Daly

I have been watching with interest as Boston University journalism professor Christopher Daly gets raked over the coals for criticizing a Washington Post reporter who wrote a story about Barack Obama’s ties to Islam without sufficiently observing that those ties are non-existent. So, far, though, I’ve refrained from writing about it.

And I’m going to remain in the shallow end of the pool, at least for now. I’m heading up to New Hampshire to cover a Giuliani event for the Guardian, and I don’t want to make the same mistake that Daly did: committing pixels to screen without giving it quite enough thought.

Still, I am amazed at the amount of vitriol Daly has received, including a scorching note from Post executive editor Leonard Downie taking the legendary Jim Romenesko to task merely for linking to Daly’s missive. Today, the dispute makes the New York Times, which is why I’m taking note of this now.

If you’re interested, here are a few links that the Times doesn’t give you:

  • The original Post story, by Perry Bacon Jr.
  • A critical column by Post ombudsman Deborah Howell
  • A short item I posted in which I endorsed a withering critique of Bacon’s story that had been published at CJR.org
  • Daly’s critique and a follow-up he wrote in response to the attacks he received
  • Downie’s letter to Romenesko (scroll through letters for other posts, both attacking and defending Daly)
  • Two very tough anti-Daly posts by journalist Seth Mnookin (here and here)

My quick take: Bacon’s story was already under heavy attack before Daly weighed in because of the peculiar manner in which it had been constructed. Supposedly the story was about false rumors being perpetrated by fringe elements of the paranoid right that Obama’s Muslim roots are a lot deeper than he’s let on, or even that he’s some sort of secret agent for Islamist extremists.

Even though Bacon describes Obama as a church-going Christian near the top of his story, the rest of the article wallows in rumorville without quite making it clear that those rumors had been thoroughly debunked months earlier. Unfortunately, given the mainstream media’s role in sliming past Democratic presidential candidates, especially Al Gore and John Kerry, liberal bloggers were on full alert and perhaps overreacted to the flaws in Bacon’s piece.

As far as I can tell, Daly’s principal mistake was to whack Bacon for being 27 years old. If an experienced editor had run Bacon’s story through the mill for just another 15 minutes, the result probably would have been a piece that no one could complain about. Reporters deserve no less, regardless of whether they’re 27 or 51, an age I (ahem) do not pull out of a hat.

Postscript: Politicians in general spend more time being seen going to church than ministers, especially just before an election. So why would the Associated Press assert that Obama’s decision to go to church yesterday was “a rejoinder to the e-mailed rumors that he is a Muslim and poses a threat to the security of the United States”? Obama attended a Congregationalist church. He is a Congregationalist. Hello?

We ain’t gonna play Sun City

Somewhere in my record collection is an album called “Sun City,” a project put together in 1985 by Steve Van Zandt, Miles Davis, “News Dissector” Danny Schechter and others to protest the apartheid regime in South Africa. Please click on the clip below — if you haven’t seen it before, you’ll be amazed. It might be the greatest music video ever made. It’s certainly the most socially conscious.

Sun City was a resort casino aimed at luring a wealthy white clientele. The idea was that money from high rollers would be used to prop up a crumbling, corrupt system that had exploited and oppressed the black population, whose most visible symbol, Nelson Mandela, had been imprisoned for many years. Eventually, of course, the regime fell, but not until incalculable damage had been done.

Who would be willing to profit from such evil? Sol Kerzner, for one. In today’s Boston Globe, Sean Murphy reports that Kerzner was the developer of Sun City, earning him accolades from Frank Sinatra as “the world’s best saloon keeper.” It’s not a secret. I had known about Kerzner’s South African ties. But I hadn’t made the connection to Sun City.

The main theme of Murphy’s story is not Sun City, but the Mohegan Sun casino in Connecticut. It seems that Kerzner and Len Wolman, the principal investors in Mohegan Sun, found a loophole in a federal law that has allowed them to pocket hundreds of millions of dollars while the Indian tribe that nominally controls the casino receives relative pennies.

Getting rich by exploiting an oppressed native people? Well, that’s really old hat to Kerzner.

Kerzner and Wolman, as you may have heard, are also the lead investors in the proposed Middleborough casino. And Kerzner, as Stephanie Vosk and George Brennan remind us in today’s Cape Cod Times, “was charged in 1986 with bribing a South African official in exchange for exclusive gaming rights. The charge was dropped in 1997, but it has followed him each time he has bid on a casino license.”

The Middleborough deal was negotiated on behalf of the investors by Glenn Marshall, who chaired the tribal council of the Mashpee Wampanoags until he was forced to resign in August after his lies about his military service and a past rape conviction were brought to light. Tribal members tell the Globe that the details of the Middleborough deal remain a secret to them to this day.

And so it goes. This is what you get when you try to make common cause with casino gambling. This is what the Middleborough selectmen fail to understand. This is what Gov. Deval Patrick thinks he can avoid through extensive governmental regulation.

What legislators need to understand is that the best way to avoid such sleaze is not to head down this road in the first place. We ain’t gonna play Sun City.

Casino opponents are winning

When Middleborough’s town meeting approved the selectmen’s deal with the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe last summer, there was an ominous context: Town officials were telling voters that the tribe would build a casino either with a deal or without one, and the town might as well get the best package it could.

That, indeed, is the most logical explanation for the fact that town meeting approved the deal, and then turned around and overwhelmingly voted “no” on an advisory question asking whether a casino should even be built in Middleborough.

Now Stephanie Vosk and George Brennan are reporting in the Cape Cod Times that the tribe continues to insist it has a right to build a casino in Massachusetts regardless of state law. As Vosk and Brennan note, it’s a position that state officials reject. Ultimately, the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs will decide.

The Casino Facts blog goes into this in more depth. But the bottom line is that casino opponents should keep fighting. As Matt Viser writes in today’s Boston Globe, Gov. Deval Patrick is making little headway with a key legislative committee in his bid to saddle us with three casinos.

Opponents are winning. This is going nowhere. Even if the feds rule that the Mashpee can build a casino in defiance of state law, I would think opponents could keep it tied up in the courts for years to come. No one should feel intimidated by the alleged inevitability of casino gambling.

My last disclosure: Enough, already. Last month I was the guest speaker at a fundraising event in Middleborough sponsored by CasinoFacts.org. Middleborough is my hometown. My opposition to casino gambling is not a secret. I have neither taken money from nor donated money to anyone associated with this issue. From this point on, I’m traveling disclosure-free.