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Steve Benen and Digby are upset about Melinda Henneberger's new series on the marriages of presidential candidates. I don't disagree that reporters spend way too much time on this kind of stuff and way too little on the issues (though horse-race coverage is a much bigger problem), but I also don't believe we should completely ignore candidate's personalities. Benen and Digby make two basic arguments:
Since I don't think Melinda Henneberger can possibly know anything about the inner workings of the candidates' marriages and I don't think their most intimate relationship would tell me anything particularly relevant about what kind of president they would be anyway, this doesn't interest me.That's Digby, but it also covers Benen's objections. There are two separate arguments here that need to be untangled. First the claim that there's no way for a reporter to ever know anything about a candidate's marriage. This is deeply unconvincing. Henneberger's first piece is on the Obamas and, while it could certainly be wrong, it draws upon an impressive variety of sources all of whom seem to present the same basic picture of the relationship. Sure, they don't know everything and it is of course possible that the Obamas are fooling us all, but that's real life. We don't have perfect information about what Obama would do about trade policy either, but we make do with the information we have. Life is full of noisy information. Deal with it.
