On Monday, April 14, Mariah Carey—“incredibly well-funded, corporately polished,” according to the bitter pop music critic of the Chicago Sun-Times—was on Oprah, stumping for votes.

“Now Mariah didn’t get her new body just by eating artichokes,” said Oprah.

Cut to the video, Mariah at the pool in a black bodysuit.

“I’m a female and I like the arms to be slender and toned!” said Mariah.

Mariah got the whole first 42 minutes of the show, and also, her new CD came out the next day!

Midway through her appearance, a mass e-mail was sent from David Plouffe, Barack Obama’s campaign manager: “You’ve probably heard about the latest dust-up in the Democratic race,” it opened.

Ugh, another dust-up? (Mr. Obama had said at a fund-raiser in San Francisco that poverty tended to embitter some people into religion and conservatism. This idea is somehow problematic or offensive; more importantly, he clearly believes it, as he saved it for a more private audience.)

According to Mr. Plouffe, the Grand Enemies of Obama “have been spinning the media and peddling fake outrage around the clock.”

Soon in this particular mini media event, someone will go too far again and lose his or her job. It will not be Mr. Obama himself. Not yet!

These events are a pachinko machine. Each incident bounces from reporter to candidate to campaign and back to reporters, offering many opportunities for anyone at all to call Hillary Clinton a monster, or say that her career is inspired by her husband’s adultery. And life, you know, offers anyone a chance to lobby on behalf of a lobbying firm you might happen to own.

Oprah herself, America’s No. 1 influencer, couldn’t help Mr. Obama, said Mark Halperin in Time late last year. She duplicates his strengths—celebrity, crowds—but doesn’t add substance. Mr. Halperin thought that a much more important event for Mr. Obama would be his visits to New Hampshire long before that state’s primary, with the likes of Samantha Power (“a Time contributor,” he noted, as well as Obama’s adviser), to talk Serious Adult Political-type policy.

Well, Ms. Power didn’t make it long before they ran her off the road.

If this election goes on much longer, everyone in a political campaign will have been fired at least once, for the sort of things we all say every day. At this point, Idaho Senator Larry Craig is starting to look like an American hero.

Arrested in an airport last summer for not having sexual activity with a cop, he entered a guilty plea to disorderly conduct, vowed to resign—and then didn’t.

In the real world, it used to be easy to be destroyed. It took Vanessa Williams really two decades to claw her way back from her Miss America de-crowning over those naked pictures—coming back up through the R&B charts, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, straight through Sondheim and now onto Ugly Betty, America’s favorite TV show.

The political world has grown less tolerant while the real world has grown more. Here in the real America, we all just want to videotape ourselves butt-naked and have a party.

“I thought, ‘Let me just make this a carefree record.’ It’s kind of a party record to me. It’s just like not caring too much about anything else that’s going on except you living in the moment,” is what Mariah told MTV about the new album.

Two years ago, I went over to Mariah’s house in Tribeca to do a puffy women’s magazine profile. Sasha Frere-Jones had just written his landmark appreciation of her in The New Yorker. “ASK HER ABOUT BEING BLACK,” he e-mailed me when I asked for advice. (Her mother was white; her father was what we call black.) So we talked about that. She was wearing a butterfly ring and Agent Provocateur heels.

“You have to come a long way to come into yourself. I wasn’t allowed to be who I really am,” she said, both of being a young black artist and a girl who likes butterfly rings. “And as I kind of lived in it, I was like, I get it: They just can’t take me being who I am. Or so the record company thinks. But I guess they were wrong.”

Then she embarked on some media criticism, about not getting too bogged down in it all. “But then it’s like—why lose the inner child, honestly? I look at the people who do and they’re just boring. They take it all so seriously. When I did Cribs—they were like, why is she going on the treadmill with the heels? ’Cuz it’s a joke! They were like, ‘The tabloids are right, she is crazy.’ The media can influence people’s perceptions—they just spit it out instead of creating their own viewpoints.”

So she was working out all this stuff in public years before Senator Obama ever had to, and came to the decision that, apart from a little workout routine on Oprah, packaging herself and staying on message just wasn’t worth it.

Sure, he’s running for president and she’s running for No. 1 diva. But her business is a lot bigger than his—and no one can throw her under a bus in the endless gotcha game, because she doesn’t have to pretend to represent anything she’s not.