Step aside Obama. Take a hike McCain.

This may seem unbelievable but somehow I’ve managed to gain a groundswell of support to run for president. Some readers may remember my quixotic bid for the U.S. Senate back in ‘00 against Hillary Clinton and the now forgotten Rick Lazio…I received about 15 write-in votes. I was buried in a landslide. Even my own mother didn’t vote for me. The only remnants of that ill-fated campaign is a bunch of leftover Phil Reisman For Senate bumper stickers and a few buttons.

But this is president thing is big because this time there’s a legion of people behind me, thanks to the powers of the Internet.

My run for the White House started as a kind of joke in some cyber-space chatrooms…and I admit I found it kind of funny at first. What I didn’t realize, however, was just how disaffected American voters are. Before I knew what was happening, the pundits and influential power brokers began to take me seriously. I started getting some press. My name is being plastered on billboards and on the sides of buses.

A political marketing team even produced a campaign commercial for me. Click on it and see for yourself.

I’ve counted nine district level delegates from Westchester and Putnam, who are breathing in the rarefied Colorado air at the Democratic Convention. You can’t tell your players without a scorecard.

Leading the way (drum roll, please) is none other than the well-traveled Andy Spano, county executive of Westchester and Bill “Boss” Ryan, the chairman of the Board of Legislators, who is serving as an alternate.  Others include, County Clerk Tim Idoni, state Sen. Andrea Stewart-Cousins of Yonkers, Carl Washington of Mount Vernon, Roberta D. Graves of Chappaqua, Paul Weaver, Jr. of New Rochelle, Edwin T. Ortiz of Yorktown Heights, and alternate Renee Diaz of Brewster.

To political observers and observers of the media charged with covering politics, I call your attention to a very provocative Harper’s Magazine “essay”:http://www.harpers.org/archive/2008/09/0082168 written by Lewis Lapham, entitled “Elegy For A Rubber Stamp.” It’s full-blown critique of the “five-star good-bye” and seemingly endless string of eulogistic NBC and MSNBC commentary given to Tim Russert following his fatal heart attack.

Fans of the late “Meet The Press” host are sure to be offended by Lapham’s deconstruction of Russert’s reputation has a tough-as-nails interviewer who held politicians’ feet to the proverbial fire.

Lapham pretty much concludes that Russert wasn’t as tough with the inside-the-beltway spinners, dissemblers and outright liars as he should’ve been—and concludes that as $5 million a year TV personality serving at the pleasure of corporate sponsors Russert wouldn’t have survived if his genuine mission was to seek and expose the truth. He compares Russert’s style to that of “an accommodating headwaiter,.”

That’s pretty harsh, but I have to confess that there were aspects to Russert’s professional modus operandi that gave me pause.

For example, James Carville and Marty Matalin, the political odd-couple, were frequent guests on his show…not that there was anything inherently wrong with that. What bothered me was the obvious personal friendshhip Russert had with Matalin-Carville, which struck me as a conflict of interest. They are the ultimate spin doctors but Russert, it seemed, was never going to call them on anything to make them look bad to a national audience.

Among the many, many expressions of sorrow over Russert’s passing, Matalin noted how Rusert “respected polticians.” She added, “He never treated them with cynicism that attends some of these interviews. So they had a place to be loved.”

A place to be loved? Let us be reminded here that Matalin is the publishing executive who helped nurture Jerome Corsi’s “Obama Nation,” the book that may do to Barack Obama what the Swift Boat attacks did to John Kerry.

One wonders how Russert, had he lived, would’ve handled Matalin’s role in this effort to discredit the Democratic candidate for president. Would he have grilled her at the risk of losing a friend?

His job was not to be loved, or to provide a safe haven for loveless pols. As Lapham pointed out there was a time way back in the distant past when a newspaperman would be damned for not having done his job properly if more than two people showed up at his funeral.

Lawrence Otis Graham will be my guest on tomorrow’s (that’s Thursday) “High Noon” radio program on WVOX, 1460 AM and wvox.com.

Graham, who lives in Chapaqua, is an author and Democratic political commentator. He is also featured in tomorrow’s semi-humorous column about Barack Obama’s possible choice for a vice presidential running mate.

Catch him  at 12 noon and call in if you like at 914-694-5008.

If you’re anxious about the economy and find yourself exhibiting strange behavior at work because you’re worried that down-sizing is just a pink slip away, then you’ll want to listen to my radio show, “High Noon.”

My guest today is a guy by the name of Morrie Schectman, a managment consultant and author of  “Fifth Wave Leadership: The Internal Frontier.” Schectman will talk to us about the modern work culture of anxiety, aggression and shame that is plaguing the corporate offices of America.

The show airs today at 12 noon on WVOX, 1460-AM. You can also listen by logging onto wvox.com.  Calls will also be taken at 914-636-0110.

At Roosevelt High School in Yonkers back in the 1960’s, he was known as Steve Tallarico, the drummer in the marching band who got expelled for drug use.

Today the world knows him as Steven Tyler, the simian front man for the rock super-group “Aerosmith”:http://www.aerosmith.com/

Well, it had to happen. Tyler, aka Tallarico, is now reportedly writing a memoir about his upbringing in the Bronx and lower Westchester, and his days as a wild and crazy rocker. Last summer, I wrote a “column”:http://www.lohud.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070816/COLUMNIST08/708160353/1010/COLUMNIST08 about some of his antics at Roosevelt where he is still remembered as one of the school’s more colorful pupils.

Tyler’s book is to be published by Ecco, a division of HarperCollins. It’s will be in book stores some time next year.

What on earth did guys like Gary Kriss do before the invention of the cell phone? Once upon a time the people’s business was carried quite efficiently without wireless devices, so this is something to ponder.

Thanks to the modern marvel of portable communication,  government insiders like Kriss are able to yak and yak all day like teenage prom queens before the big dance. It’s nothing but an addiction, a technological fetish.

As any observer of Westchester County government knows, Kriss is the $150,000-a-year chief adviser to Bill “Boss” Ryan, the chairman of the board of legislators. Kriss is under a criminal investigation in connection with thousands of dollars of electronic stuff he bought using a county credit card. Among the gadgets were computer software and, yes, cell phones.

Indeed, his use of a county cellphone is also under scrutiny.  It seems that between May and Nov. 6, 2007, Kriss engaged in 18 calls with Domenic Volpe, a Democrat who ran against County Legislator George Oros, R-Cortlandt. Kriss, of course,  is (or was) a loyal servant to Boss Ryan, a Democrat who loves partisan politics and undoubtedly would’ve knocking another Republican off the board to further consolidate his power.

Questions have arisen over the nature of the Kriss-Volpe conversations as to wheher they were political in nature. If they were political, then they were in direct violation of the county’s Code of Conduct and Board policy which prohibits a staff member from doing political work against a sitting legislator.

Kriss’s defenders, Ryan being one of them, say the calls were on the up- and-up, even thought they went right up to and included Election Day. I guess they were just yakking about the weather.

Oros won anyway.

The mortgage meltdown is making everybody nervous about home values, even in the more desirable neighborhoods of Westchester.

I was certainly anxious when we put my mother’s Larchmont house up for sale earlier this summer. It was a good house with a nice yard, but modest when held up to the Larchmont  stereotype.

Built in the 1920s with a small, state-of-the-artless kitchen, the house cost about $16,000 when my parents bought it just after the close of the Second World War. It’s strong selling points, however, included being in the Murray Avenue Elementary School district and its proximity to the Larchmont train station.

Over the years, its value sky-rocketed as did houses everywhere. The real estate gravy train looked like it would never run out of steam. At the height of the real estate bubble, I was astonished to learn that a house down the block sold for a little more than a million dollars.

I knew we wouldn’t get anything near that amount, but by the summer of  2007, I  feared that our timing was unfortunate. The market was beginning to tank. I wondered: Would we get a good price and how long would we have to wait before we got it?

Consulting with the real estate at Coldwell Banker, we decided to ask $729,000. A couple of years earlier when home-sale prices were really going crazy, I would have pegged it at $800,000 or more.

Still, $729,000 was nothing to sneeze at. Well, it turned out the people actually bid on the house and we ultimately sold it for $765,000, much to my relief.

I think we were lucky. We got good advice from savvy real estate people, who remained confident through the process, despite the unrelenting news of a falling real estate  values, failing financial institutions and tightening credit.

Larchmont was a different story, they said reassuringly. This isn’t like the messes in Florida, Arizona  or Nevad.

But I think even they were relieved over how well things turned out. That’s because a few weeks ago,  I got an advertisement in the mail from Coldwell-Banker. On the front of  it was a picture of my mother’s house with a caption on top saying, “Gone in 23 Days!”

Like it was a miracle of biblical proportions.  And maybe it was.

Yes, it’s way too early to think about the 2009 elections in Westchester, but one candidate for district attorney has already come out swinging.

Dan Schorr, a former assistant DA and a Republican is looking to unseat Janet DiFiore, the incumbent prosecutor.

Schorr will be my guest tomorrow on “High Noon,” the WVOX radio program I host on Thursdays.

Tune in to 1460 AM or log onto wvox.com. Calls will be taken at 914-636-0110.

UPDATE: Here’s the podcast:

Download:

It’s no surprise but it seems a lot of people are finding out they’re owed money that’s been sitting in New York state’s “unclaimed funds” kitty.  I wrote about it today in my column, after I discovered that a check for a couple of hundred dollars never reached my father while he was alive and working as a freelance writer.

The state comptroller’s office has $9 billion in unclaimed “funds”:http://www.osc.state.ny.us/funds due to lost addresses,  misplaced bank and stock accounts, etc. Most people don’t even know they’re entitled to any money until they contact the state. Usually the sums are no more than $100, which explains why they may be forgotten.

Today, I heard from a friend who read my column and discovered that he, too, had money coming to him.  An old-timer called to thank me because he called the state and found that he had two outstanding accounts to collect.

“I’ll buy you a bunch of lollipops,” he said.

Not everybody is happy, however. A woman from Briarcliff Manor reported to me that she has had a hard time collecting $4,000 in checks she failed to deposit “in a timely manner.”  She said it’s been a tortuous, year-long process trying to prove the money is hers.