BY MARK SHIELDS

The late Rep. Morris Udall of Arizona, who finished second in the campaign for the 1976 Democratic presidential nomination, warned his fellow citizens with the wisest of advice: “Beware of the presidential candidate who has no friends his own age and confidants who can tell him to go to hell.”
That same year, an emotionally secure President Gerald Ford more than passed the Udall test. Having already put his presidency in mortal jeopardy by pardoning his resigned and prosecutable predecessor, Richard Nixon, Ford trailed Democrat Jimmy Carter by 33 percent in polls. After Ford’s shrewd pollster, Bob Teeter, discovered in his surveys that when Ford had personally campaigned in the primaries his national numbers actually slipped, it fell to Stu Spencer, the campaign’s peerless strategist, to deliver the blunt consensus of Ford’s closest advisers: “Mr. President, you are a very good president. But as a campaigner, you are no (expletive) good.”
According to two people who were in that small meeting, the president first scowled but then smiled. As leader of his party in the House, he had campaigned nationally for Republican candidates. But these men in the room were his friends and confidants who were telling him a bitter truth. Thus was born the Rose Garden strategy, in which Ford would surge within an eyelash of pulling off the greatest comeback in U.S. political history by being president full time.
Recent events in Washington reminded me of Mo Udall and Jerry Ford, two exceptionally admirable Americans. Whatever else we ultimately learn about the relevance or irrelevance of undeclared 2016 Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton’s emails, it’s pretty clear that among her intimates, there was no Stu Spencer to say to her: “Excuse me, but are you out of your (expletive) mind? You, as secretary of state, want to set up and use your own private email account and eventually delete thousands of messages? That is morally and politically unacceptable.”
Does President Barack Obama see or talk to anyone who tells him bluntly: “Mr. President, politics, you do not seem to understand, is about a lot more than winning a national election. Politics is a relentlessly personal business. People thrive on just being called on, being asked for their help or opinions, and being recognized and appreciated for what they do.”
Where is Obama’s Stu Spencer to tell him about why Lyndon B. Johnson, when he was Senate majority leader with only a razor-thin majority, never lost a single showdown vote to the toweringly popular Republican President Dwight Eisenhower? LBJ was always able somehow to persuade that one wavering colleague to come his way. Johnson once explained that all he needed to know about any senator whom he was wooing was whether that senator’s mother had married up or married down — intellectually, economically or socially.
If the mother had married down, then — according to Johnson — she had transferred all her hopes and ambitions to her son. All Johnson had to do was to assure the hesitating senator that by this vote, the senator was going to make his mother proud of her son.
To find out more about Mark Shields and read his past columns, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.
COPYRIGHT 2015 MARK SHIELDS
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BY L. BRENT BOZELL AND TIM GRAHAM

TV and movie producers rarely focus on Catholic priests in their plots, let alone use them as central characters, as in “The Father Dowling Mysteries” or “Father Murphy” in the 1980s. Maybe that’s a good thing, because when Catholic priests are part of the plot these days, there is an unmistakable odor of aggression — mocking, vilifying, and disparaging not just Catholic priests, but the priesthood itself.
On March 4, on the nation’s most religion-mocking channel, Comedy Central, the late-night game show “@Midnight” featured the comedian Neal Brennan. Host Chris Hardwick asked a question about confession, to which Brennan responded, “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned, I went to Catholic school growing up. While I was never molested, I did f—- a few priests.”
The Catholic League points out this isn’t original for Brennan. On the premiere of his own standup show on Comedy Central, which aired Jan. 19, 2014, Brennan commented that he went to Catholic school for 12 years. “No, I didn’t get molested, I f—– a few priests, but I didn’t get molested.”
The Fox comedy “The Mindy Project” on March 10 featured a priest played by … Stephen Colbert. Colbert’s priest was a man who turned away from a very sinful past, which is certainly possible. A turn from moral degradation to holiness might even be inspiring. Not so with this one. This priest began his sermon by boasting he’d had sex with 275 women and had used “crazy drugs.” He chest-thumped about this at a funeral Mass.
Colbert’s priest was the usual Catholic nightmare, all about punishing, even excommunicating believers for using birth control and having premarital sex. “Trust me,” he sermonized, “these little sins are just a straight a path to hellfire as all that really cool stuff I used to do.”
Then there was the Feb. 26 season finale of the ABC drama “How To Get Away with Murder.” A priest was accused of murdering another priest. The guilty priest told the defense team he killed an older priest in his parish by pounding his skull in with a blunt golden object — the thurible, which holds the incense used in the Mass. They showed one of the show’s law-student characters insisting, “Not all priests are pedophiles,” with another shooting back, “Since when?”
The priest who was killed had confessed to abusing a teenage boy who later hung himself. The plot is not just offensive. It’s dishonest. After a decade-plus of reform by the Catholic Church — including an order to priests to break the seal of confession to report child abuse — the priest still says, “I thought about breaking the sacrament, reporting what he told me, but I know they’d just transfer him.”
TV producers insist their stories “reflect reality, claiming even they’re “ripped from the headlines.” Well, there are other religious traditions that collide with human frailty.
In recent weeks, newspapers have reported some eye-opening stories: the Washington rabbi who admitted to taping a large number of married women getting naked in the ritual bath called a mikvah; the female Episcopalian bishop in Baltimore with a history of drunk driving who struck and killed a bicyclist; and a Chicago imam charged with a pattern of sexual abuse of women and girls.
There will be no Hollywood plot lines based on these headlines. Tinseltown tradition suggests these real-life plots just aren’t “real” enough — which is to say, interesting enough — for television. Were these offenses committed by Catholic priests, it would be a different story altogether. They are in the Hollywood bull’s-eye at all times.
L. Brent Bozell III is the president of the Media Research Center. Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org. To find out more about Brent Bozell III and Tim Graham, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.
COPYRIGHT 2015 CREATORS.COM