Talked Out

Posted on Columbia Journalism Review (cjr.org) - Jan. 26, 2011

By Steve Daley

Like a lot of folks I was surprised by the apparent sacking of Keith Olbermann at MSNBC, if for no other reason than it’s unusual for marginal enterprises such as cable networks to rid themselves of their most popular commodity.

But as I read the postmortems and the sendoffs, it occurred to me that it had been some time – a long time, actually – since I had watched Keith Olbermann. Or anyone else in that boisterous, opinionated and way-up the-remote-dial realm.

When Comcast sent Keith packing, it struck me that I had put myself on an ersatz boycott of what used to be my favorite “news” programming and managed not to notice.

The thing is, I am the target audience for this stuff. I’m an election junkie, a defrocked journalist, a person with ironclad political beliefs and an Irish temperament. But somewhere back in the days of George W. Bush I just stopped watching.

No, it’s not W’s fault, though he and his minions sure didn’t help back when they were getting that war in Iraq going.

It’s a kind of rhetorical combat fatigue, a sense that all these years later you aren’t going to hear anything that is in any way new and different. It’s a feeling that you’d be just as well off watching “Bones” on Fox rather than anything else on Fox.

The malaise built slowly, if I may borrow a concept from President Carter.

The Sunday morning talk shows went first. There was a time – it was May, 1992 – when I could spend the better part of an afternoon with friends chewing over the job that NBC’s Tim Russert had done on “Meet the Press” to a dithering presidential candidate named Ross Perot.

But nowadays, no matter who is in the big chair, watching a pair of over-coached Senators, one from each party, racing through the approved talking points on immigration or TARP seems a poor way to spend a Sunday.

When all the world was young I marveled at the interview prowess of Ted Koppel in his “Nightline” days and may have contributed to the legend by writing at least two adoring pieces about him when I was media critic at the Chicago Tribune.

As a consumer I confess I was hooked in the early 1980s when “The McLaughlin Group” made its bumptious debut, giggling as Jack Germond tussled with and outsmarted Robert Novak, Pat Buchanan and Morton Kondracke.

Now it seems that for me the lure of the advocacy format has gone the way of caring about the Super Bowl and drinking at lunch.

Just between us, I have never watched Glenn Beck or Bill O’Reilly. Or Ed Schultz. At least not for more than minute or two. And I’m pretty sure I don’t have to.

It’s mostly bipartisan on my end. Al Franken in the U.S. Senate? Fine. Al Franken on the radio? No, thanks. The allure of Sean Hannity is lost on me; he’s “Fox and Friends” Steve Doocy with an anger management problem.

Lawrence O’Donnell is every slick Capitol Hill VIP staffer who only talked to the New York Times and the Washington Post. While I enjoyed Stephen Colbert’s skewering of the Washington press at that 2006 White House Correspondent’s Dinner, he is, well, exhausting and not as clever as he thinks he is.

Rachel Maddow seems to be wicked smart and sassy, or so it says here. But even her considerable charms are lost on me. I turn it on, I listen for a bit, I go away. And I think I know why.

Opinion is now a team sport. Interview shows, talk shows, panel shows are set pieces and to some degree they always have been. I like this pundit, you like another. This one got the better of that one the other night.

What exists in cable-ville now is a set of armies storming across open ground, interrupting, smirking and eyeball rolling to the cheers of their partisans, left and right. Now it is a team game – my team versus your team, no quarter, army ants with all the racial and gender slots filled.

Make no mistake: I haven’t checked out. I read what’s left of the good newspapers and scour websites such as this one. And, to be honest, the social network makes sure I don’t have to miss a good rant by Maddow or, until the other day, Olbermann, if I don’t want to.

Finally, this is not an argument for civility, whatever that means. It’s part of my lifelong war on boredom. And my solution is a simple one: “Bones.”

Selling St. Vincent's

The church is for sale. It’s been a long time since I’ve been what they call a “practicing Catholic” but a recent tour of the website of my hometown newspaper in Corning N.Y. produced a startling news item.

St. Vincent de Paul’s, the Roman Catholic church, school, rectory and convent that pretty much defined the first part of my life, is on the block, about to be sold to a developer.

Senior housing. Sale price, they say, is about $350,000. It will likely be some years in the making or unmaking, but there will be no going back.

Growing up, there were three Roman Catholic churches and the three Catholic schools in a town that probably never got larger than 20,000 people.

St. Vincent’s was within easy walking distance of our house. My maternal grandparents lived within sight of it, on Onondaga St. My grandfather, Paul Lovette, spent large chunks of his retirement pulling weeds from the lush lawn that surrounded the church. It was for him an act of faith.

My sister Maribeth and I would often walk the block to our grandparents’ house for lunch on a school day, a tableau worthy of a TV sitcom in the lower-middle-class America of the early 1960s. And a very sweet memory.

I was an altar boy from the 5th grade through my freshman year of high school, back in the days when the Latin Mass was in vogue.

I can recite some of those prayers in Latin, in the same way I can still smell the incense that pervaded the Lenten services and Midnight Mass on Christmas and the funerals, including the funerals of both my parents.

Joe and Betty Daley were married in St. Vincent’s after World War II. When the service was over, the wedding party and the congregation walked to the reception in the back yard on Onondaga St.

There’s a part of all this that mystifies me and I guess it’s my reaction – or overreaction – to the latest news.

The demographics of Corning have been changing for decades and the population has fallen. It was below 11,000 in the 2000 census.

Many of the kids who coped with Sister Domenica in the 5th grade and Sister Paul in the 6th grade, who sold candy bars and magazines and Easter seals to raise money for the parish, as I did, are grandparents now.

There are fewer people in the town, fewer people in the churches. In some ways it’s simply the sociological math.

The “parochial” school where I spent eight years has been shuttered for many years. The Sisters of Mercy are mostly gone, as are the priests.

It may sound odd in this era to say that we liked the priests. They came to the house; they showed up at the hospital with a kind word and some priestly reassurance.

They knew about you and your people, your grandfather who was a railroad engineer and your other grandfather, the one who pulled the dandelions.

They remembered names, asked how you were doing in school, were kind and respectful to the old women who showed up alone in the cold for the 6 a.m. Mass. They were useful. As far as I can tell, they are all but extinct.

Some years ago the three Corning churches (St. Mary’s and St. Patrick’s were the others) and the Immaculate Heart of Mary parish in nearby Painted Post merged into what became known as All Saints Parish.

From a distance it seemed a poor resolution. I saw it as a loss of cultural and community identity, papered over by a generic designation - “All Saints Parish” - that seemed drawn up by a committee.

But nobody asked me, which was fair enough as I was gone from both Corning and the church.

St. Patrick’s was sold outright. Sunday Mass was performed on a rotating basis. The weekday Mass - there were two every morning at 6 and 7 at St. Vincent’s when I was growing up - kept the altar boy crew busy. Nowadays Mass is a Sunday-only affair.

I read the melancholy news stories in the Corning paper, with angry parishioners and equivocating clergy. I see the property described as a “campus” and I think, well, that’s real estate talking. I think someone has a fundamental misunderstanding of what went on there on Dodge Ave. for the better part of a century.

I think that I am a hopeless romantic, getting older, nostalgic about a religion I abandoned at 17. And I think that I was lucky.

The Travel Section Blues

Posted on Columbia Journalism Review (www.cjr.org) - Sept. 8, 2010


By Steve Daley

Paris is a puzzle. San Francisco is an affront. The west of Ireland is a slap in the face.

The travel sections of magazines and newspapers are at once a favorite getaway and an IQ test at which I am not doing so well.

Manhattan Island is a riddle. Santa Fe, New Mexico is a mystery. London is an enigma.

My traveling life has slowed a bit in recent years and the truth is I’ve never gotten around the planet like Arthur Frommer or John Glenn. But on my own and with my wife, Jane, we’ve hit some high spots. A honeymoon in Wales. How about that?

So when the travel sections of fine newspapers and periodicals offer to tell me where to go and where to stay and where to eat and where to rent that bike, I’m all in. And if you’re writing about Kiev or Karachi or Ketchikan – places I will never, ever go – I’m easy to please.

But when I survey the tick list of restaurants, hotels, saloons and museums in places I have actually visited, I begin to feel like a young George Orwell, down and out, drinking out of the bus pans of legendary pubs, boites and four-star restaurants.

Travel writers have given me a geographic inferiority complex. When the New York Times offers “36 Hours In…” Nantucket or Copenhagen or St. Louis or Edinburgh, well, you’ll generally find me in the wrong part of town.

From coastal Maine to La Jolla, from Key West to Toronto to Big Sur, it seems there is always a perfect family-owned restaurant I missed, or a lively up-and-coming neighborhood I took a taxi through without stopping, or a can’t-miss folk art museum I went just one subway stop beyond.

I was eating in Montmarte and le tout seasoned travelers were fine dining on the cheap at least an arrondissemont away.

I was at having a pint in McDaid’s pub on Harry Street in Dublin and the smart set was drinking Pinot Grigio and bunking down in swell, if tiny, Euro digs in that city’s Temple Bar neighborhood. I’m touring London’s Portobello Road and the New York Times is picking through antiques in Budapest.

Truth is, when marooned amongst the travel writers, even Washington, D.C., a place I call home, often seems as alien to me as Bratislava.

(Except for Ben’s Chili Bowl. Apparently it is not possible for an English language publication to write about visiting Washington, D.C. without mentioning Ben’s Chili Bowl).

The whole experience is enough to give a fellow a dose of travel section agoraphobia. I’m always a day late – metaphorically – and a guidebook short.

Consider London. Been there, and more than once. Never had a bad time. But every visit to a travel section convinces me that I am a lost soul, an incidental tourist, that guy in Bermuda shorts and a porkpie hat emblazoned with “USA,” stumbling around Piccadilly Circus and Trafalgar Square with three maps and a pocket filled with strange coins.

My wife and I have a list of places in central London that we enjoy revisiting, but not long ago the Washington Post, told me I should be surveying neighborhoods on “the city’s edge… “where the pace is slower, and the prices lower…”

Sure, St. Paul’s Cathedral is a nice stop and you could go to a play in the West End one night, but it turns out I should be in Stoke Newington or Crouch End. These are places I thought you passed through on the Tube in from Heathrow Airport.

There are pressures on the traveling scribblers. I get that. From Milan to the Meatpacking District, it’s hard to keep up with the drinking and dancing whereabouts of the 26-year-olds.

Boutique hotels open with the frequency of new airline baggage fees. Sushi fusion restaurants with optional truffle fries must be celebrated.

On my last foray to New York City, I stayed in a perfectly acceptable hotel on the far West Side in a neighborhood where a decade ago you were more likely to find a methadone clinic than a taxi.

It’s a new world. And I’ve got the wrong map.

Ways and Means

Posted on Huffington Post - Aug. 13, 2010


By Steve Daley

In the death of Rep. Dan Rostenkowski of Chicago, there is for some of us a kind of guilty pleasure.

The obits have struggled to give the former chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee his due as a legislator, as a master of reaching bipartisan consensus on the thorniest of tax and entitlement issues.

But the overlay, as he understood and predicted, was indictment, loss of power, felony conviction and time served. “Powerful, Corrupt” is the headline writer’s shorthand, and that is fair enough in its way.

Perhaps society benefited from Rostenkowski’s conviction on two counts of mail fraud and the 17 months he spent in a federal lockup, winding up in a Salvation Army halfway house before his release. But this society will have to get a good deal more saintly before some of us think so.

As a reporter and columnist, I didn’t know Rostenkowski very well. Many of my colleagues, particularly in Chicago, knew him far better.

But I had time to observe him in his role as a committee chairman and there is this:

Rostenkowski came to Washington with a purpose. He did not come here to tell us how much he loved Jesus or to sit on cable television and impugn the motives of others.

The only worthwhile members of Congress are those who come to the place with that sense of purpose, whether you agree with that purpose or not. And you can get a good argument their estimable numbers are shrinking.

Rosty wanted power and influence and he wanted to get things done. It took him a while to get to his chairmanship but by any standard, by any measure, he succeeded at getting things done.

He was imperious and greedy, arrogant and tribal and, if you spent time on Capitol Hill, you understood that he was also widely respected and much beloved.

“Everybody has a district,” he said to me once. “Everybody had to go home and explain what they did here. Understanding that is fundamental.”

Ways and Means was not run as a democracy, but Rostenkowski understood the fears and ambitions of his colleagues, especially those on his committee.

In a sense he was all clichés. He combined a love of the back-room deal with that hoariest of congressional bromides – be a workhorse, not a show horse. Denizens of the Capitol, including many reporters, delighted in his bumptious, brash behavior and in his effectiveness.

I recall watching him deliver a floor speech – a relative rarity – on a bill to raise the pay of House members. Most of his colleagues wanted the money, of course, but they cowered in fear of constituent phone calls and the wrath of the opinion makers.

Rosty marched to the lectern and roared at the gathering, insisting on his worth, insisting that he would defend his salary back in Chicago.

Watching from behind him in the press gallery, I saw the beaming faces of his peers – Republicans and Democrats – basking in the moment. Here was a man living their dream – unapologetic and proud of his work.

Even his legislative failures were compelling. In 1989 a crowd of irate seniors famously chased him through the streets of his district over a health-care measure known as “catastrophic care.”

I wrote a Sunday column suggesting that if the voters of his district wanted face time with the Chairman on the matter they should pony up a $2000 honorarium and get him to give a speech.

The next week, the phone rang and an aide asked me to hold for the Chairman.

Rostenkowski had seen the column and, as his voice rose, said that I needed to know – not that he cared - that he didn’t give speeches for a mere $2000.

Another morning in the House I watched an esteemed reporter for the New York Times follow Rosty toward a door to one of the many meeting rooms he commanded.

The Timesman had more questions. Rosty had no more answers. He opened the door, stepped inside and shut the door in the reporter’s face.

Another Times reporter, the late Robin Toner, turned to me with a smile on her face. “Well,” she said, “you don’t see that happen to my paper very often.”

Finally, there is the art of the performance. Understanding this concept is not possible if you possess a reflexive distaste for politicians. But there it is.

There is pleasure to be drawn and something to be learned from watching someone do their job with surpassing skill, and a little style. Think Michael Jordan going to the hoop, Meryl Streep at the movies, Derek Jeter playing baseball, Mike Royko at the height of his column writing powers, Bill Clinton or Ronald Reagan working a crowd.

For all his imperfections, which will be well chronicled this week and next, Rostenkowski was exceedingly good at being Dan Rostenkowski, chairman of House Ways and Means Committee. There are worse legacies.

Mornings at Tammany Hall

The art teacher generally turned up at Tammany Hall around 9 in the morning. The saloon was closed, but someone would let Cliff through the double doors of the converted Washington townhouse near 21st St. and Pennsylvania Ave. NW. He would amble to the far end of the bar, away from the doors and the windows and place his briefcase on the barstool next to him.

He was an art professor, actually, at George Washington University, just a block down the street, and a watercolorist of some renown. “Gin,” he would offer, though anyone behind the battered counter would already be reaching for the Beefeater bottle.

Some men who drink at 9 in the morning need a newspaper or a crossword puzzle or a detective novel as a prop. And of course, in the era of Dick Nixon, the cell phone had not yet become an all-purpose appendage and refuge.

Cliff needed nothing but the gin. He was meticulous, quiet and polite, making church steeples with his fingers and pushing back his lank brown hair. He did not require gossip or bartender bonhomie or witless chat about the weekly fate of the Washington Redskins. He needed gin.

Around 10, Mr. Sims, a native Washingtonian of indeterminate age, would make his way from the downstairs kitchen to Cliff’s end of the bar. He would fire up a Kool, nod at Cliff and shoot a look at the bartender.

Charles Sims was famously uninterested in the names of the customers or of his white-boy colleagues who tended bar or waited tables. Someone would place three fingers of room-temperature gin in front of him and he would knock it back, always offering the same assessment.

“Make you sick or make you well,” he’d gasp.

From time to time, as a kind of peace offering, Charles would emerge from the kitchen with bowls of what he called “Turkey Butt stew.” The translation was literal – Charles wasted nothing in the Tammany Hall kitchen. But as appalling as it was in concept, we came to believe the stew (it was soup, actually) possessed miraculous, recuperative powers over the hangover. To that end we consumed it with vigor, and we didn’t ask too many questions.

For his part, Cliff, the art professor, would ignore the stew and generally have a pair of large gins, maybe three on a morning when the prospect of facing his students and his peers got the better of him.

Their behavior was in no way viewed as unusual or problematic, and the gin in the bottle was almost never Beefeater.

Resplendent in a turtleneck and Frye boots, I was the guy behind the counter cutting the fruit. Being hired as a waiter at Tammany had saved me from a life of graduate school and working as a loan officer wannabe in a bank on 14th St. I had ascended to day bartender when a colleague had, in a festive manner, fallen down about a hundred rows of seats at RFK Stadium.

“No hard feelings,” Leigh told me. “I ‘d rather wait tables. You actually like talking to these people.” And I did.

I was a guy who had never had much fun, and was essentially unfamiliar with the concept. On my 25th birthday, my new friends Tom Costello and Chris Reidy appeared to tell me I would be working the bar that October night and they would be celebrating my birthday because, well, they felt I didn’t know how.

They were right. But I learned pretty fast. Unlike the bank or grad school, the bar was always open. Cash flowed into the tip jar. There were interesting women with drinks who stayed up late. At night a gaggle of journalistic regulars appeared, men and women who looked like they were having a lot of fun on and off the job. There was live music a couple nights a week, notably Emmylou Harris and Asleep at the Wheel.

My career path was just about where I wanted it to be.

On some mornings we would earn an early visit from Father Tim, a crowd favorite in local saloon circles. He was a defrocked priest and a kind of hero by our raffish standards, having been bounced from the clergy by the Roman Catholic archbishop of Washington for “disseminating” birth control information to poor women.

Not abortion counseling. Father Tim lost his stripes for suggesting to poor women that they needn’t get pregnant. A firing offense in those days.

So we liked Father Tim. But he was not without his odd habits and tendencies. He kept a number of checkbooks, including one that identified him – ex post facto – as a priest. Bars honored personal checks in those days and it was remarkable how often Father Tim would flash the priestly checkbook in Georgetown or on Capitol Hill and be told it was all on the house. And thanks for coming in, Father.

At Tammany Hall we were in on the game, of course, but the padre never got whacked for more than every other drink. This was despite the fact that Father Tim routinely indulged in a personal saloon ritual that can only be described as disturbing.

Customers who order the same drink the same way every time are generally held in high regard by bartenders. And Father Tim pushed the limits, as unpredictable as the College of Cardinals. Perhaps it was some relic of his boyhood days in the seminary but the good father insisted on many variations of beverage, all in the same vessel. He might start with a soda, then transfer his affections to a Bloody Mary, then perhaps move on to a cold draft beer. Same glass.

We viewed this conduct as closer to a mortal sin than a venial one, but he was our mascot priest. He was often in the company of Maryland real estate moguls who were masquerading as doctors, looking for some public entity to build them a hospital, the better to fleece the government and the needy.

Father Tim forgave them their sins, apparently, but we pounded their bar checks, making them pay for everything, and then some. It was a simple rule of thumb: if someone we liked was going to pay a little less, then someone else was going to have to pay a little more.

At about 11:30, the place was as ready as it was ever going to be for business. On an average morning I’d brew another pot of coffee, discreetly pour the better part of a quart of King George IV scotch into a Dewar’s bottle and tighten the apron.

Normal people – strays – would be coming for hamburgers and chef salads and fish & chips, with iced tea, and we would have to serve them. “The job must be done,” Tom Costello would say. In five or six hours we could start the party again.


Cliff, Mr. Sims and Father Tim are real people; they are not real names.

Thinking About Crustaceans

We had the annual Fourth of July crabfest on the deck last weekend, a family tradition of relatively recent vintage hinged on a group consensus around Maryland hardshell crab.

It has become an exspensive habit - $72 a dozen for large crabs from Captain Pell's out on the edge of Fairfax County, Va. - but my wife, Jane, is a purist in these matters. And, as the man said of Christmas, it's only once a year.

Three dozen, with barbecued chicken and ribs, corn on the cob, potato salad, sliced tomatoes, collard greens (they come with the barbecue). We passed on the desserts this year, and nobody drinks as much as they used to, if at all. Still, plenty of cold beer at the ready.

My brother-in-law, Hugh, makes his own dipping sauce. My sister-in-law, Gwen, has acquired a taste for Woodchuck hard cider at these affairs, a reality that amazed and amused her daughter, Meredith. And my wife prides herself on eschewing the use of wooden hammers and shell crackers, using ony a paring knife to tame the beasts. The rest of us pound away as if we were clubbing the backsides of BP oil executives.

I used to insist on some shrimp at these affairs until I came to understand that I would learn to love blue crab or suffer the marital consequences. And I did. Learn to love blue crab.

It was hotter than the hubs of Hell, of course. And spreading three dozen crabs encrusted with Old Bay seasoning on a table laden with sides and covered in that morning's Sunday Washington Post produces a pile of refuse worthy of a small rural community. But it's sloppy and communal in the best sense of the words.

Blue crabs are strange, crawly predatory creatures and stranger dining fare. But they are hugely popular in Virginia, Maryland and Washington. The appeal spans race and gender; the local crab house is a haven for pickup trucks and BMWs, as popular with the Kenny Chesney crowd as it is with black and Hispanic families and, well, my family.

Hardshell crabs require an enormous amount of effort to generate a small amount of actual food - think artichokes but much, much better. And just about everyone who has eaten the critters three times in their adult lives becomes a self-proclaimed expert on the art and science of picking crabs.

Most of the meat is tucked away in little chambers beneath the outer shell and access requires scaling back the shell (easy enough) and peeling away the less-than-appetizing gills and "mustard," and, well, you get the general idea.

This year's bash was a little different. No one in my family really wants to talk about the horror in the Gulf of Mexico. Individually and collectively we are teeming with outrage and frustrated that this catastrophe does not appear to have generated nearly enough interest, anger and concern in the appropriate circles. The President is worried; the Coast Guard guy issues updates; the BP execs hide behind advertising while fronting employees in branded golf shirts to do their talking for them. The press keeps a respectful distance.

There is only that obscene video of the exploded well, fouling our own nest at the most fundamental level. And, by the way, who decided this was "a spill," like something a clumsy waiter would do?

The gusher, now reaching into its third month, is in fact a savage indictment of our inability - our unwillingness - to take care of our home.

So while we tried not to think the Gulf, we thought about Chesapeake Bay, where, according to some estimates, more than 400 million blue crabs abide. Still.

I thought about a quote from H.L. Mencken, an authority on matters of Maryland seafood and many other things. He called Chesapeake Bay "the great big outdoor protein factory." And we wondered what would become of that "protein factory," and all the others.

Too Many Cooks

Published in the Columbia Journalism Review Online (www.cjr.org) - June 9, 2010


By Steve Daley

There they are again, this time on the front of the Washington Post "Style" section (6/4/10). It’s the celebrity chefs, and this time they’re in service to First Lady Michelle Obama and her campaign against childhood obesity.

The latest "Style" section snapshot of the culinary elites preceded a larger White House gathering of chefs who are every bit as serious about school nutrition as they are about a $28 chunk of pan roasted Arctic char with orange and rosemary beurre blanc.

We are in the age of the unavoidable cook. They won’t stay in the kitchen unless someone puts a camera in there.

Chef profiles crowd the pages of city magazines such as "Boston," "Los Angeles," and "Washingtonian." These publications track the career paths and great thoughts of chefs the way the old "Sporting News" used to follow All-Star shortstops.

Celebrity chefs overrun HBO’s clever "Treme," though it must be said the shiny, self-satisfied chaps playing themselves in a ruined post-Katrina New Orleans are well behaved, unlike the gaggle of posturing gangsta chefs who torment waiters and rail (generally in British and French accents) on cable television.

Gordon Ramsay, for example, presides over Fox’s "Hell’s Kitchen" like volcanic actor Joe Pesci in "Goodfellas", though in real-world terms he’s about a scary as crème brulee.

Ramsey’s normally affable British colleague Jamie Oliver, the tousle-haired “Naked Chef,” recently took his "Food Revolution" on ABC to Huntington, W. Va.

The locals, having been identified by the Centers for Disease Controls as particularly pitiful examples of lard-based American consumption, handed Oliver his colander when he toyed with the school lunch menu.

“They don’t understand me,” Oliver whinged to the press, and he wasn’t talking about his accent. For the moment, the “Food Revolution” will not be televised.

Anthony Bourdain, a prominent chef and frequent author perpetually angry about something, has a new book: "Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook".

Check, please.

The quality of the food in this new celebrity driven universe can be left for others to judge. But there is little doubt that the publicity machinery for the “top chefs” is four-star.

Consider the Cleveland-based Michael Symon, one of the Food Network’s “Iron Chefs.” He has mounted a heart-healthy campaign to keep resident basketball superstar LeBron James in the greater Cuyahoga County area.

Symon announced he would cook for James and his friends once a month if the big guy would re-sign with the NBA’s Cleveland Cavaliers.

It seems like a middling incentive for James, who reportedly makes $15 million a year to play hoops and owns a $29 million endorsement contract from Nike. He could fly to Paris every week for dinner. But that doesn’t mean every news outlet from NBC to Yahoo Sports didn’t cover Symon’s offer.

The man’s a chef. Send a crew.

On May 2, Washington chef Jose Andres—one of Michelle Obama’s high-profile backers in the obesity battle - was the subject of an adoring "60 Minutes" profile.

The fawning segment, which would have made Donald Trump uncomfortable, focused on Andres’s modest roots and his charitable work.

But when Andres began to feed CBS interrogator Anderson Cooper in the chef’s fashionable, six-seat “Minibar by Jose Andres” establishment, a viewer could have been forgiven for thinking the Dalai Lama had gone into the restaurant business.

“Minibar is a window into creativity, that’s all,” said Andres, earning a nod from Cooper.

Last month, Chicago Sun-Times Washington reporter Lynn Sweet felt obliged to apologize to Chicago chef Rick Bayless, who had been drafted by the Obama message machine to assist in a May 19 state dinner for the president of Mexico.

It seems Bayless, demonstrating the professional modesty that characterizes his line of work, had sent a Twitter message or three about his White House culinary experience to his legions of cilantro-happy fans.

Twittering from inside the White House is in violation of some twenty-first century edict, as Sweet reported. Bayless swore on his garlic press that he did not engage in online social networking while actually on site at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

The whole enchilada wound up in “Politico,” The Washington Post, all available Chicago media, and a raft of food blogs, and Sweet opted to apologize.

The brouhaha might have been fueled by the fact that Bayless had given interviews about his bond with the Obamas and his “guest White House chef” status to The New York Times and NPR.

It’s no secret that after the gate-crashing fiasco at the Obama’s first state dinner, Bayless’s dear friends were determined to keep the gala a low-key affair until the plates were being cleared.

But in Chef World, publicity is seated at the other end of the food chain from salt: Too much is never enough.