"LEND ME YOUR EARS...I GET BY WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM MY FRIENDS"

Guests of the weekly Gang-up: John Harwood, reporter, "Wall Street Journal", Margaret Carlson, writes a weekly column for Bloomberg News and is the Washington editor of The Week magazine, Andrew Sullivan, senior editor, "The New Republic," and columnist, "Time".

One of the most endearing characters of American politics was Ross Perot. During one of his presidential debates in funny self-deprecation he uttered, "I'm all ears". The man with the pie charts and crew cut knew, and political cartoons reminded him, that his head cut a particularly unique profile, so he made light of it.

In the current religious media extasis about Sen. Barak Hussein Obama only a few radio talk shows, certainly not NPR or the DR Show, have covered a little incident that happened this week after the candidate for political canonization confronted NT Tymes columnist Maureen Dowd. Ms. Dowd had made some remarks in writing about Sen. Obama's auricular protuberances and he was letting her know he didn't like it!

After finishing his speech (in New Hampshire) Sen. Obama confronted Ms. Dowd, famously known for her dissatisfaction with men and now apparently obssesed about men's ears. Unaware, their words were recorded.

Sen. Obama (off mic): "You talked about my ears, and I just want to put you on notice: I'm very sensitive about -- What I told them was, ''I was teased relentlessly when I was a kid about my big ears.' "

Ms. Dowd (purring): "We're trying to toughen you up."

"Put you on notice"? Imagine if a male Republican or conservative candidate had said something like that! We would hearing that recording for two weeks straight, at least! Feminists would burn him alive! Remember when Sen. Clinton's male opponent approached her podium during a debate? Oh the humanity! He invaded her space! He was threatening!

Of course, as it is obvious, the media is not only "preparing the way of the Lord" so to speak for Sen. Obama, but also coaching him. And he will need a lot of that if he is so thin-skinned about his physical appearance (which is why we have decided to make our own artistic contribution to toughen him up also). Due to the cannonization process, and the lack of coverage of this incident, it would be doubtful whether political cartoonists will exploit the incident to create cartoons about it. In fact, they may practice self-imposed "politically correct" restraint in making sure they don't offend the Senator and his devotees.

Sen. Obama should learn from Ross Perot but he must learn the right lesson. Although he has found a sympathetic ally in the main stream media, not everyone will be so kind. In the end Ross Perot was not thick-skin enough to handle an assault on his daughter and came out with an almost paranoiac excuse to leave the race.

Maybe Maureen Dowd is correct. If Sen. Obama is going for the long haul he needs to toughen up. And although Ms. Dowd might be trying to help in that regard, so far it looks like the mainstream is only doing everything they can to throw flowers at his path.