US: Journalism, said G.K. Chesterton, consists of saying "Lord Jones Dead" to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive.
So I have to tell you today that Senator Bob Graham has dropped out of the crowded Democratic race for 2004 even though you may not have know he was running. The courteous Florida senator could not ignite the crowds and ran out of money. So now there are nine.
Retired General Wesley Clark has taken the lead in voter popularity, according to a nationwide Gallup poll of Democratic voters on Thursday. This shows him with 21 per cent support to 16 per cent for Howard Dean and 13 per cent for Senators Joe Lieberman and John Kerry.
It was hardly surprising then that the field should gang up on Clark in the latest performance, in Phoenix, Arizona, on Thursday, of what has become a monthly political road show - the televised debates among the Democratic candidates for president.
In the last one in New York, Clark got a free ride as the new boy who only joined the party on September 3rd.
This time he came under sharp attack for his late conversion and his record of cosying up to Republicans before seeing the light.
He had praised Bush and Cheney at a Republican fund-raiser in 2001 and he told several reporters last month that he probably would have backed the Iraq war resolution in Congress - to the horror of supporters promoting him as the anti-war general.
He backtracked the next day. "I must say, I have been very disappointed since Wes Clark came into this race about the various positions he has taken on the war," said Joe Lieberman.
Howard Dean accused him of advising another politician to support the resolution. "I would never have voted for war," retorted the general. "The war was unnecessary. It was an elective war and it has been a huge strategic mistake for this country."
Clark is vulnerable on his war flip-flops and, despite national recognition, has work to do to catch up on his rivals where it counts - New Hampshire, where the first primary takes place in 15 weeks.
There the latest poll shows Dean, a former governor of neighbouring Vermont, leading Kerry from neighbouring Massachusetts by 29 per cent to 19 per cent. The rest, including Clark from faraway Arkansas, are in single digits.
Following in the footsteps of Nancy Reagan as First Lady of California and spouse of a Republican governor is something that Maria Shriver can hardly have imagined as she grew up in the heart of the Kennedy family in Massachusetts, or even a year ago before the California recall when she combined a career of looking after her four children and working for NBC.
She has done a lot of celebrity reporting: her recent stories included a legal case taken by a rich Hollywood woman suffering from the side-effects of botox and an interview with singer Celine Dion. She occasionally did some political reporting and once in the 2000 campaign, John McCain snapped: "Please get out of here," as she approached with a microphone. She will get more respect from politicians now.
Shriver will go back to work at NBC but will not cover California politics now that husband Arnold Schwarzenegger is to be governor, just as fellow-NBC correspondent Andrea Mitchell, married to Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, steers clear of stories about interest rates.
The power couple do not plan to move to Sacramento to take up residence in the governor 's mansion, but then Gray Davis didn't live there either. The Californian political class all hang out in LA.
The 30-room Victorian pile in the state capital - the fire escape was a rope hanging from an upstairs window - was abandoned by the Reagans half a century ago and is now a museum. Nor are they likely to follow the example of Governor Jerry Brown, who slept on a mattress in a Sacramento flat.
The Schwarzenegger family will probably remain in their $12 million five-bedroom mansion on six acres in Brentwood, the gated community of Los Angeles where O.J. Simpson once lived.
When covering the California recall election, I got lost in a Los Angeles Latino district and couldn't find anyone who spoke English in the fast-food joints and auto repair shops. According to a US census report this week, one American in five today does not speak English round the dinner table.
In California, four in 10 people speak Spanish as a first language. The census found that 12 million Americans live in linguistically isolated homes where nobody speaks English, up by more than 50 per cent from 1990.
Spanish (or "Mexican" as George Bush calls it) comes first in non-English languages spoken, with Chinese next and Russian catching up fast. A quarter of a million Russian-born immigrants live in New York and they now have their own Russian-language radio and television stations.
Another surprise is that two million Americans speak French at home. One of the linguistic triumphs of the modern world is how the people of Quebec preserved French as their language, despite being isolated in a sea of English-speakers and subject to the sneers of Parisians who mock their provincial pronunciation.
They are no longer alone.
A White House shake-up this week saw Condoleezza Rice take over co-ordination of Iraq reconstruction from the Pentagon's Donald Rumsfeld. Was this what President Bush was referring to when he went to New Hampshire to explain his policy on the war? "I was not about to leave the security of the American people in the hands of a madman," he said.
For the record, he went on to explain he was referring to Saddam Hussein.