WHAT'S IN A NAME? PLENTY IF IT'S KENNEDY

It's hard to imagine that Patrick Kennedy would have gotten elected
to Congress a dozen years ago without his last name.

It's equally hard to imagine that the media would be going wild about
his late-night car crash and prescription drug addiction if he
weren't a Kennedy.

The only lingering mystery is why national news organizations didn't
pounce earlier on the Rhode Island Democrat's long history of alcohol
and drug abuse, depression and a series of downright embarrassing incidents.

The answer in large measure is that Kennedy hasn't been a very
important House member. But given the journalistic obsession with the
Kennedy family and its tragicomic soap opera, he does seem to have
gotten an easy ride -- except in the New England press, which has
chronicled his every misstep.

While Kennedy, the 38-year-old son of Ted Kennedy, was widely
reported to have held a news conference Friday, it was nothing of the
sort. He read a statement designed to elicit sympathy, saying he was
going into rehab, and took no questions. This amounted to an age-old
damage-control technique: changing the subject.

Kennedy refused to respond to questions about his crashing into a
Capitol police barrier at 2:45 a.m. Thursday and whether he had been
drinking -- as one Hill bartender told the Boston Herald -- or, as he
has maintained, was in a stupor caused by Ambien and another
prescription drug. The story gained the whiff of a cover-up when a
Capitol Police supervisor blocked any sobriety test.

When national news organizations last week began throwing together
their congressman-in-trouble profiles -- along with the inevitable
Ambien sidebars -- there was a long list of local clips to pore over.

In 1991, while a state representative, Kennedy acknowledged --
following a National Enquirer story -- having used cocaine as a
teenager, but said he had kicked the habit years earlier by checking
into a treatment center.

In 2000 alone, Kennedy got into a scuffle with an airport security
guard, who said he shoved her during an argument about oversize
luggage; admitted taking antidepressants; was accused by a charter
company of causing $28,000 in damage to a rented sailboat; and, after
a few drinks and an argument, had a distraught date call the Coast
Guard to be rescued from his chartered yacht.

Just last month, Kennedy hit another car in a Rhode Island parking lot.

Relatively little of this drew significant national coverage. Among
the brief mentions in the New York Times, a 2002 piece on Kennedy's
reelection campaign included a paragraph on his personal problems,
quoting the congressman as saying: "If you are a Kennedy, people
always make more of such things than really exists, and the true
Kennedy haters just won't let go of it."

More typical were earlier Times pieces headlined "Wielding the
Kennedy Name for the Good of His Party" and "Kennedy With Oomph (and
Moneybags) Is Patrick." A 2000 Los Angeles Times piece on Kennedy's
money-raising prowess said he can be a "hothead" who "almost came to
blows" with a Republican lawmaker. The Washington Post covered a
couple of the incidents as gossip items and ran such short news
stories as "Rep. Kennedy Hopes to Quit House Fundraising Post."

Kennedy has gotten rougher treatment in his home region, where Boston
Herald columnist Howie Carr last week called him "generally dumber
than two rocks."

It's difficult not to feel sympathy for Kennedy, who grew up in a
relentlessly scrutinized family in which two of his uncles were
murdered. But soft-focus media coverage has given him plenty of
chances, far more than would be accorded a run-of-the-mill
congressman with his history of self-inflicted wounds.

Thanks to his Capitol fender-bender, however, that is likely to change.

Target in Chief

Are stumbling presidents just plain funny?

Does sinking in the polls produce a rising tide of ridicule?

Do millionaire comedians like kickin' 'em when they're down?

You bet. The number of late-night jokes about George W. Bush has more
than doubled this year -- with almost a third of them mocking his
intelligence, followed by his declining popularity, his personality,
the Dubai ports deal and the war in Iraq.

Jay Leno, David Letterman and Conan O'Brien averaged 45 Bush jokes a
month last year, says the Center for Media and Public Affairs. But
for the first three months of this year, they have popped the
president 102 times a month.

Leno: "The president does not like change in personnel. He likes to
keep the same people. I think he got this from having the same
third-grade teacher year after year."

Letterman: "According to a recent poll, three out of five Americans
believe George W. Bush should be impeached. And when he heard that,
the president said, 'Cool, I love peaches.' "

O'Brien: "In a speech yesterday -- this is true -- President Bush
told the Iraqi people to, this is a quote, 'Get governing.' Then, the
president introduced his new speechwriter, Larry the Cable Guy."

The ridicule factor is a pretty decent political barometer. In 1998,
the number of late-night jokes about Bill Clinton more than doubled
-- to more than 140 a month -- as the Lewinsky affair launched
endless punch lines about the president as horndog. In Bush's case,
his rocky performance has revived the old stereotype of W. as dim
bulb, or perhaps made it safer to skewer the president than, say, in
the sober aftermath of 9/11.

The importance of humor was underscored in heavy-breathing fashion
after Stephen Colbert's performance at the White House
Correspondents' Association Dinner. Some C-SPAN viewers liked his
routine, and others -- including most of the media gang in attendance
-- did not.

Many liberal bloggers were quick to denounce the mainstream media for
not showering the Comedy Central host with publicity and praise. The
reason, said these bloggers, was that Colbert had skewered Bush in a
way that embarrassed the timid White House press corps.

"Colbert's was a brave and shocking performance," writes Chris Durang
in the Huffington Post. "And for the media to pretend it isn't
newsworthy is . . . a symbol of how shoddy and suspect the media is."
Salon Editor Joan Walsh says "Colbert's deadly performance . . .
exposed the mainstream press' pathetic collusion" with the administration.

Really? Or are left-wingers just so mad at the media for not
denouncing Bush daily that they prefer the zingers of a fake anchor?

Colbert did take some swipes at the president in the guise of the
blowhard pundit he plays on TV. ("You know where he stands. He
believes the same thing Wednesday that he believed on Monday, no
matter what happened Tuesday.") But it was hardly the stinging
denunciation being cheered on by his liberal fans. In fact, Colbert
was just as dismissive in what he described as his "contempt" for the
black-tie crowd of Washington journalists. ("Over the last five years
you people were so good -- over tax cuts, WMD intelligence, the
effect of global warming. We Americans didn't want to know, and you
had the courtesy not to try to find out.")

Humor often cuts in a way that journalism doesn't, which is why
Bush's late-night drubbing is serious business. Bush's detractors are
convinced that Colbert drew blood, and maybe journalists were
unenthusiastic because they got scratched in the process. But the
jokes wouldn't resonate if much of the country wasn't already unhappy
with the president.