Tim Russert was a cog in the political machine

A red-faced, overweight and very valuable piece of commercial property named Tim Russert fell dead at the age of 58 in an NBC soundroom in Washington DC a week ago, unleashing an astounding and excessive flow of homages to his skills and influence.

George and Laura Bush attended the public wake after a private funeral where Barack Obama and John McCain sat next to each other, apparently on the family's instructions. The political and journalistic elites turned out for a televised memorial service at the Kennedy Centre, with Bruce Springsteen sending a video tribute from Europe. In Buffalo, New York, where Russert was born the son of a garbage collector, the flags flew at half-mast.

Britons probably know as little of Russert as Americans do of Jeremy Paxman. Political journalism is mostly an insular affair, unless turned into a parable, the knights of the fourth estate jousting bravely against the dark forces of despotism. This happened with CBS's Ed Murrow in the 1950s in his confrontations with the witch-hunting Joe McCarthy, also with the Washington Post's Woodward and Bernstein in the early 1970s.

Russert certainly had the skills, the reputation and the venue - Meet the Press, watched avidly by politicians and journalists every Sunday - to take on those dark forces of despotism, in the shape of Bush and Cheney, who were busy trashing the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and enlisting the press in prepping public opinion for the attack on Iraq in 2003.

Yet Russert helped sell the war, the same way he helped sell the notion - contradicted in the polls - that Americans reckoned that defeating al-Qaeda was more important than honouring habeas corpus or prohibitions on torture. Those doubting the tall tales in the New York Times and Washington Post about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction had a hard time on Russert's show.

He had a political background, but there was nothing much in it to foster the spirit of defiance. A Catholic, educated by the Jesuits, he was still in his 20s when he became chief of staff for Mario Cuomo, governor of New York. From there he went to work for Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, paradigmatic neo-con and formulator of the infamous advice to President Nixon that matters of racial justice should enter a period of "benign neglect". Moynihan was for many years a negative, uncreative force in American politics, and Russert was very close to him.

When it came to the nuts and bolts of politics, Russert knew what he was talking about. But his expertise was in the ebb and flow of mainstream politics, not in where the system was headed, or where it might be going seriously off-track. When he sensed something unusual, he took fright, as in one of the primary debates he moderated back in February, where he started swatting Obama with questions about possible ties to the Rev Farrakhan as well as to Jeremiah Wright. Like Moynihan, he didn't care for uppity blacks.

After the Watergate scandal was over in 1974 and Nixon bundled off in disgrace to California, Katharine Graham, chairman of the Washington Post and employer of Woodward and Bernstein, cautioned journalists: "The press these days should... be rather careful about its role. We may have acquired some tendencies about over- involvement we had better overcome. We had better not yield to the temptation to go on re-fighting the next war and see conspiracy and cover-up where they do not exist."

Out of that warning came the failures to see conspiracy where it did exist, in the manufacture of the WMD threat and in the treatment of politics as business-as-usual, somewhat like a game - an approach in which Russert excelled. He never had to lunch alone. In the 1880s, Joseph Pulitzer hung a sign in the newsroom of his paper, the New York World, which read: "The World has no friends." Russert, as the recent obsequies attest, had far too many. ·