It would be easy to single out Governor Mike Huckabee for this distinction. Heck, I may be guilty of underrating him even today. Huckabee turned in magnificent performances in debates for months, he campaigned hard, and he carved out an interesting political niche — all with virtually no cash.

But picking Huckabee would be boring.

So I’m going to select former British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Blair’s Labor Party basically ran their party’s leader out of town on a rail last summer so that they could hand the reins of government over to Gordon Brown.

Brown was supposedly young and energized, similar to Blair when he first came into office.

Blair had the courage of convictions, and was a rare statesman in modern politics. Calling him Churchillian may sound like hyperbole, but it’s not far off.

Brown, in contrast, seems rather ordinary. And his record since moving into #10 Downing Street has been pretty rough. Labor’s electoral fortunates have tanked. Brown’s policy agenda seems broadly thwarted. And Brown’s positive attributes don’t seem to have materialized.

So in retrospect, it turns out that Tony Blair was doing an awfully good job as Prime Minister. I wonder how many Labor MPs and party leaders would like the chance to reconsider their treatment of Mr. Blair in his final months?

Jim: I wonder if I can go with not quite a figure, but an event.

In my gut, I’m sympathetic to the Hollywood writers. I think if they’re not seeing any dough from work of theirs that is distributed over the Internet, they’re getting a raw deal, and the studios ought to give them their fair share. I’m not an accountant or an arbiter, I can’t tell you what a fair share is, but I figure it can’t be too far off from revenue percentages from other media.

But I think we’ll look back on the Writer’s Strike as An Event That Changed Hollywood and Pop Culture Forever.

As the strike has brought most television production to a standstill, we’ve seen networks getting ready to go all-reality, all the time. One of two things are going to happen as NBC becomes all-choir training and all-American Gladiators for the majority of their programming. Either there will be enough viewers to keep the networks in the black, or there won’t, and the networks will fold. If it’s the former, the networks may never feel a need to do more than a few scripted shows per year. If it’s the latter, once people find other entertainment options, I’m not sure they will come back.

The traditional audience for television is disappearing - going to the Internet, going to video game systems, going to On Demand, DVDs… perhaps even reading. One of the recurring themes here on On Tap is our collective irritation that television networks cancel shows we like like Firefly and keep crappy shows on the air because they’re cheap to produce. I watch a lot less television than I used to. With a baby in the house, I’m seeing fewer movies than I did a year ago.

In an effort to preserve their share of profits from new distribution systems, the striking writers and stubborn studios are hastening the destruction of the old distribution systems. It’s a truly colossal change, and nobody really knows what media world will be waiting for us when we get to the other side of this clash. The ramifications of this fight are, I submit, underrated in their importance.