Media killed the political star.

I mostly spend my time talking about the kind of media that most of us prefer. Fictional, disposable, fun. Nothing too heavy or hard on the stomach, like the the Caesar salad before the meal. But lately, I've been hearing a lot of people talk about the 2008 election and just wishing it would end and end now because of how "messy" and "dirty" it is.

To which I say:

Welcome to 21st century politics.

I once was a high school journalist, and in one of my journalism classes, we watched a documentary on the American press. Oh, there was more to it than that, but that was the meat and potatoes of the documentary: one hundred years of political press coverage.

One of the men on the documentary was in his later 70s. He'd been a young reporter during the FDR administration and was discussing his time as a White House correspondant. He talked with candor about his thoughts on the Clinton affair and the media coverage thereof as well, and during this, dropped a bomb: both FDR and Eleanor had lovers living in the White House during his administration.

Let me repeat: they both had lovers living in the White House.

The difference, he explained, was this: at the time that FDR was in office, there was an unspoked standard that the private life of anyone, even a politician, was meant to be private. It wasn't the business of the American people if FDR had a mistress or ten, living with him or just coming by for a quickie; he was the President, and he deserved some of his life to be outside of the public eye.

Now, I don't know when this standard shifted. Maybe it was after television. Maybe it was later. What I do know is that, somewhere down the line, it became expected that everything politicians did should be an open forum, available for public scrutiny. Your child went on a bender one weekend, you cheated on your wife, you choked on a pretzel and hit your head, whatever the "crime", it wasn't your own, private shame. It belonged to the world.

So many people seem dismayed that things like Sarah Palin's pregnant daughter or Barack Obama's pastor are being flashed all over the media. It's calling into queston the kind of mother Palin is, the kind of Christian Obama is, and with it comes all the dirt, the muck-raking, and the generally bad behavior.

There's a moment in The West Wing when the young, attractive minority candidate and his wife are shocked to find news stories about things like his wife's thong underwear (which is captured in a photograph when she crouches to pick up one of their kids), or when they broke a bed in the course of love-making. He is annoyed at some points, angry at others, and the general reaction of the people around him is, "This is what happens in a campaign."

This is what happens in a campaign. It's been happening since 2000. It will happen until a candidate stands up and refuses to parade his family, pastor, friends, distant relatives, and neighbors in front of cameras as proof of what a great guy he is. It will happen until a candidate doesn't use their child or children as another example of their platform. It will happen until a candidate is brave enough to stand up and say, "My family is not for public consumption. My private life is not for public consumption. I am not going to let them be humiliated."

That candidate will lose, but at least he'll make a point.