We Interrupt The Campaign to Bring You This Special Report...

I just watched the beginning of the newscast (the “top” of the show, if you speak newsroom-ese) for ABC’s “World News Tonight,” the open to the show when the big stories in the broadcast are ”teased” for a few seconds before the anchor shows up on camera. For the first time in many weeks, the presidential campaign didn’t make the cut on this newscast preview. Instead, the Wall Street financial crisis, the devastation left behind by Hurricane Ike in Texas, and the aftermath of the horrible commuter train crash in Los Angeles got the nod.

It’s an aspect of presidential campaigns that’s not often addressed, but can have a big impact; namely, what ELSE is going on besides the race for the White House. In other words, how many other things are going on that take our attention away from politics? Few would argue with ABC’s news judgment, or ours here at the CW11, for that matter. Our first segment tonight (the stories before the first commercial break) is focused entirely on the Wall Street meltdown and the Ike cleanup. Campaign news is dealt with rather briskly in the fourth segment, halfway through the show, sort of the equivalent of being on page A18 in the newspaper instead of the front page.

It makes a big difference. In some ways, the campaigns are virtually frozen in place, unable to get their daily messages out to the public with the, ahem, fanfare we’ve seen the last few weeks. (I watched the first 15-minutes of “World News Tonight,” and didn’t hear Sarah Palin’s name mentioned once!) Discussions at the water cooler or at the bus stop are about what’s going on in the financial district, or what’s left of Galveston, not whether John McCain is really a reformer or if Barack Obama is all talk.

Even a short break from taking up all the news oxygen can impact a campaign. For three weeks it’s been all Sarah Palin, all the time. Perhaps it will help the McCain campaign to not have the Alaska governor front and center in the news for a few days. I see today that some tracking polls are showing her approval ratings falling, down very close to her disapproval number. A sign of Palin fatigue? A media break could help the GOP (Obama’s running mate, Joe Biden, on the other hand, has been virtually invisible in the media compared with the saturation coverage of his GOP counterpart. Yet he’s maintained his overall high approval ratings. There’s a lesson here somewhere.) Then again, the pause in political coverage to report these other huge stories might be good for the Democrats, giving the Obama ticket, and democrats who support him, the chance to take the proverbial deep breath and recover from that nasty bout Palin panic, which is at least as serious a condition as Palin fatigue.

Of course, the campaign will be back front and center in days. But maybe the seriousness and tragedy of what we’ve just seen in Texas, Los Angeles, and the Financial District will make us less willing to buy into political nonsense about pigs and lipstick and any other absurd smokescreens the campaigns will try and put up. Real life, in all its raw and tragic dimensions, has pushed politics to the back burner for a few days. Let’s hope it’s real life and real people that the presidential race focuses on when it returns to the top of the newscasts. At least, for awhile.