A good point:
Until a few weeks ago, Gen. Wesley Clark was a supporter of Hillary Clinton, a loyalist urging her to fight till the end -- and, therefore, an opponent of Obama.
Then, he says something about McCain which the Republican portray as attacking McCain's military service, and suddenly from the coverage you'd conclude that he's Obama's top military advisor or something:
"We have reached a point in surrogatedom where even the most tangentially attached talker is assigned value beyond reality to feed the 24 hour news cycle.
"In order to the feed the beast, intimations are made that Clark's role in Obama's campaign is more than that of Democrat wanting the Democratic candidate to win. Instead, he's a 'surrogate', an amorphous title imparting a sense of closeness, of advisement, and most ominously, of having a direct line to the candidate so to better parrot his talking points."