Politics and government nowadays are as much about stagecraft as statecraft. The “hurricane-disrupted” Republican national convention is a recent example. Gustav was more than a thousand miles away and no threat to St. Paul. The threat was to the possibility of Republicans coming across as doing politics as usual while Americans were being battered. Irony of ironies, in the guise of not being political the GOP played politics to the hilt with Gustav by, among other things, fiddling with the convention schedule and presenting a supposedly hurricane-preoccupied president by satellite. The New York Times helpfully reported that President Bush spoke from the White House after Hurricane Gustav “forced him” to cancel plans to appear in person. Athletic contests, theatrical productions and many other events remote from the Gulf coast went on uninterrupted, but that’s not the way politicians have come to do their work.

No doubt Republicans were haunted by the drubbing they took from critics over Katrina and wanted better reviews this time. With the press uncritically reporting the convention as “hurricane disrupted,” they may well find that the ploy played well in Peoria.

To be sure, government as show-biz is bipartisan. Jimmy Carter virtually sequestered himself in the White House during the Iranian hostage crisis ostensibly to focus on the plight of the hostages. Why he couldn’t do that away from the White House was unexplained.

In 2003, George Bush, in full pilot gear, flew to the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln to announce that major operations in Iraq were over. Thousands of deaths and amputated limbs later, the conflict in Iraq, while much reduced, continues. The “Mission Accomplished” fiasco illustrates the great danger of substituting show-biz values for reality: Sooner or later facts can intrude, and, when they do, manipulation boomerangs.

A certain number of people, of course, are gullible. The job of the press is not to help them be gulled by simply repeating the story line of those whose aim in life is to hoodwink them.

Probably no great harm was done by allowing the GOP to pose as a sort of hurricane victim, just as no harm is done when a president poses as a friend of education by reading to school kids. But the press needs to be alert to the ever-present temptation by politicians to bamboozle the public, and to avoid being complicit in deception.