Jon Margolis, former chief political reporter for the Chicago Tribune and the author of "The Last Innocent Year: America in 1964," lives in northeastern Vermont, where he writes and teaches.

Thanks to Michael Phelps, Usain Bolt and their associates, and – less happily – Vladimir Putin, Mikheil Saakashvili and theirs, we have been treated to a lull in politics and political coverage.

Oh, stuff has happened, been written about and analyzed, but in a tone suggesting that the writers and analysts understand that fewer folks than usual are paying attention. A perfect opportunity for making today’s exercise a potpourri, a hit-and-miss hodgepodge noting a few disparate matters before the conventions descend upon us.

Because as everyone knows, after this lull the conventions will offer us two weeks of … well, more lull, really. So uneventful are these events that Slate magazine’s  usually sensible press critic Jack  Shafer suggests that journalists boycott them.

Such an excessive reaction to the wretched excess of the conventions. Too cavalierly, Shafer dismisses the political reporter’s obligation to be wherever thousands of political operatives gather. Not worth the expense, Shafer says. Maybe, but that’s the bean-counter’s decision. Instinct should lead reporters to declare that when thousands of sources are in the same city during the same week, lips likely loosened by lavish libation, that is where their ears belong.

Besides, there could be an event of sorts. Unless they do it any day now, the nominees may spice up their conventions by exercising that great quadrennial drama: the naming of the running mates.

The sooner the better. Once they are named, we can all be spared the inanity of the innumerable stories about whose name it would be. Or, worse, the absolutely certain declaration of one talking head or another that it undoubtedly would (or, substitute here “would not”) be (insert name of choice).

Only on rare occasions did this discussion reach the depths of the unintentionally (or not?) satirical headline on the Aug. 14 New York Times story about the possibility of Sen. Evan Bayh ending up as Barack Obama’s choice: “Indiana Senator Offers Obama Risks and Rewards.”

Yup. Hard to argue with that one. Still, did nobody ever consider the obvious fact that only the two prospective nominees knew whom they would choose, or the wisdom of waiting until they told us, at which point we would all know at the same time? It isn’t that there were no substantial discussions going on these past few weeks. There were, and sometimes journalists tried to get at the reality behind the rhetoric. Alas, they often did so sloppily.

Consider the Aug. 9 version of CNN’s “This Week in Politics” in which host Tom Foreman, senior business correspondent Ali Velshi, and congressional correspondent Jessica Yellin discussed the candidates energy policies.

Obama’s proposed “windfall profits tax” could end up decreasing the supply of oil, Foreman said, noting that “a similar plan failed back in the 1980s … for that very reason.”

In fact, despite its name, the “crude oil windfall profit tax” of 1980 was not a windfall profits tax, but an excise tax, levied by the barrel, not on the company’s profit margin. What Obama is proposing appears to be closer to the World War II “excess profits tax,” which levied an extra tax on profits that exceeded average earnings from 1936 to 1939.

Whether the 1980 tax “failed” is open to debate. It did not bring in nearly as much revenue as its sponsors had projected. And in the eight years it was in effect, domestic oil production fell. But by just about the same rate that it had fallen before its passage – and has fallen since its repeal. Attributing the decline to that tax doesn’t seem logical. Domestic oil production has been falling “largely because the relatively cheap oil has been pumped” in the words of Norbert Walter, the chief economist for Deutsche Bank Group, presumably not an environmental extremist.

This doesn’t mean the CNN correspondents were biased. They cast the same skeptical eye on John McCain’s energy policies. They just weren’t particularly well-informed.

Nor does it mean that there aren’t perfectly sound reasons for questioning and opposing Obama’s proposal. His plan would use the revenue from the tax to send each household a $1,000 check to “provide short-term relief to American families facing pain at the pump,” according to his campaign Web site.

But that of course would create an incentive for people to buy more gas, likely leading to higher gas prices, and therefore higher oil company profits. Besides, the basic thrust of Obama’s energy policy is to get people to use less gasoline. Here he encourages them to use more.

Give those CNN reporters credit, though. At least they tried to get the story behind the story. Too often, it seems, nobody bothers. Otherwise, more attention might have been paid to the remarks – absurd though they may seem on first reading – of  Rep. Michele Bachman, a Republican who represents the area around St. Cloud, Minn.

The reason the Democrats are reluctant to open up more land and sea to oil drilling, she said, is that “they want Americans to take transit and move to the inner cities. They want Americans to move to the urban core, live in tenements [and] take light rail to their government jobs. That’s their vision for America."

OK, for purposes of discussion, let’s stipulate that Rep. Bachman – who has described concern about global warming as “voodoo, nonsense, hokum, a hoax” and who is the sponsor of legislation guaranteeing our right to continue buying incandescent light bulbs (HR 5616), is indifferent to the charms of understatement. But you know what? She has a point.

There is an anti-suburban outlook among some factions of the left side of the political spectrum. It hardly includes the entire Democratic Party, or all liberals.  But neither is it confined solely to the ranks of hard-line environmentalists. It is an outlook most bluntly and consistently expressed by James Howard Kunstler, author of several books and proprietor of a blog the name of which is too pungent for this space. Suburbia, Kunstler recently wrote, is “the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world.”

Somewhat more moderately, the popular liberal blogger Duncan Black, whose blog names (he is Atrios, his blog Eschaton) are printable if inscrutable, often argues how superior city life is to suburbia (he’s a Philadelphian) while acknowledging that not everyone has to share his taste.

There are objective, empirically testable, arguments in favor of this pro-city, anti-suburban outlook. When Kunstler says, “American suburbia requires an infinite supply of cheap energy in order to function and we have now entered a permanent global energy crisis that will change the whole equation of daily life,” he might be overstating the case, but his argument can’t be casually dismissed.

Still, it’s clear that these commentators and at least some of the officeholders who agree with them share a more subjective distaste – both social and esthetic – for suburban life. They think suburban living is sterile. They think suburbia is ugly. They are, to one degree or another, delighted by $4-a-gallon gasoline because they think it will force us all to make the changes they find desirable.

Actually, the changes might not have to be as stark as some of them would like. According to the aforementioned Norbert Walter, writing back in 2001, the U.S. could exceed its obligations under the Kyoto Protocol if it managed to become almost as energy-efficient as Western Europe, where people live quite well. They have electricity, drive cars, use cell phones and computers as much as we do. They just use less fuel in the process.

Not surprisingly in a suburban-majority nation, anti-suburbanism has produced a backlash, led by Republicans such as Rep. Bachman and conservative commentators, who insist that we have plenty of oil to keep driving just as much as ever and just as cheaply as ever if we only drill, drill, drill. But the argument transcends the factual dispute over who’s right about how much oil we have and how much it would cost. It’s really an argument between those who are saying, “we don’t live quite right; we have to make some changes,” and those who say, “no, we don’t; we’re fine the way we are.”

This is not the place to resolve that dispute, or even to probe deeply into it. It is the place to wonder why the coverage of the campaign seems not to recognize that this is the underlying dispute. It is as though no one in a newsroom paused to think about whether the day-to-day political squabbling rested atop the foundation of some deep-seated attitudes, opinions and prejudices.

Granted, there may not be anybody left so to pause. All this newsroom downsizing has no doubt depleted the supply of pausers. Like great academic departments, great news organizations should be slightly over-staffed, so there is somebody around to do some thinking about what’s really going on. Maybe nobody’s around any more.

Or maybe the mindset of political journalists has narrowed. If so, this wouldn’t be because the journalists have narrower minds. It would be because 24/7 cable stations and incessant static from the blogosphere leave little time or energy to do anything but keep up with the latest effluvia.

Such as, at this very moment (noon, Monday Aug. 18), the extraordinarily unimportant squabble over whether McCain was in the “cone of silence” while Obama appeared with Rev. Rick Warren last weekend, or whether the Obama staffers are being crybabies by suggesting that he was not, or whether NBC News’ Andrea Mitchell was somehow carrying water for the Obama-ites by mentioning the matter on “Meet the Press” Sunday.

Effluvia indeed. Sometimes it’s hard to remember that there is a real world out there.