It’s widely accepted that the media pigeon-holes stories and people into simple narratives with a strict limit of one to two sound bytes. This campaign cycle is interesting, not merely because so much of the conventional wisdom now seems quaint, but because it presents an opportunity to observe the re-renderings as they happen.

Hillary’s bytes have changed the least. While always seen by oxycontin right as the ambitious embodiment of 60’s liberal evil, she has also been tagged “divisive” yet intelligent and diligent, and her persistence makes her seem like terminator 4 in a blue pantsuit. The narrative of her campaign has progressed from the unstoppable Clinton machine, to a mismanaged Machiavellian leviathan which is now entering its terminal phase. So the blue collar, shots at the bar act didn’t fly, but we respect and admire her steely endurance.

Barack Obama’s media id badge may be the most interesting because it is the most dynamic. Obama materialized on the 2004 convention stage, a ready made democratic messiah, almost a direct cross between Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy. However, all pundits knew how naive this hope stuff can be. Sure the speeches were nice, but is soaring rhetoric weapon enough in the blood sport that is presidential politics? Danger was near as Mo D lucidly explained that:

The lioness of Chappaqua is hot on the trail of the Chicago gazelle, eager to gnaw him to pieces, like a harrowing scene out of a George Stubbs painting.

And if she didn’t shred him, certainly the dread republican attack machine would. Surely enough, a “bitter” remark, an angry preacher, a weather undergrounder, and an “undercaffeinated” debate performance against the machine that is Hillary turned the once unflappable messiah into Dukakis and/or McGovern. Had our man been crucified at the alter of Jeremiah?

Hold the Press. Last week’s blow out in North Carolina and overtime showing in Indiana have forced a new narrative, still in progress. Could the “Chicago gazelle” now be battle tested?

Even George Will (who has showed signs of Obama cool aid ingestion in the past) wrote that:

Obama is the Democrats’ Reagan. Obama’s rhetorical cotton candy lacks Reagan’s ideological nourishment, but he is Reaganesque in two important senses: People like listening to him, and his manner lulls his adversaries into underestimating his sheer toughness – the tempered steel beneath the sleek suits.

So even George Will admits there maybe steel behind the cotton candy.

But what about John McCain? The straight talking maverick with temper problems? Bill Clinton has done a good job of mitigating media bytes concerning McCain’s temper. (Perhaps there’s an Associate Press guideline that only allows per one label per person per news cycle, unless it’s Republicans claiming the Reagan mantel, which ironically enough, has been claimed by Obama.)

And reality itself should be sufficient to force a re-write of the straight talk, maverick thing. By reality, I mean Maverick’s blatant genuflection to Brothers Robertson and Falwell and his windsurfing flip on the Bush Tax Cuts.

The renegade who in 2000 referred to the religious right as “agents of intolerance,” who have “turned good causes into businesses,” and “shame our faith, our party and our country", was in 2007 in full pander mode at Liberty University. And this very same maverick could not in “good conscience support a tax cut in which so many of the benefits go to the most fortunate among us at the expense of middle-class Americans who need tax relief” has in 2008 made making these cuts permanent the center piece of his economic platform. Never mind the deficit, our grandchildren, and principle, better to shore up the Rove permanent majority before we unleash the swiftboats.

So as the democratic nomination soap opera enters its 22nd inning, I wonder - will Obama re-emerge fired up and ready to go, leading a realignment ending the Reagan era? Or will he turn into George McGovern as McCain’s Roves flood the airwaves with the “bitter” and “liberal” gospels of Jeremiah?