Jon Chait and Matt Yglesias have already had some fun with Dan Balz's peculiar call for the national press corps to interrupt coverage of this election in order to focus all firepower on Obama and presumably swing the vote towards McCain. But while Chait is agog at the obvious bias and Yglesias is bemused by Balz's call for more one-sided policy scrutiny by reporters who don't do policy work at all, I'm more puzzled by the sorts of questions Balz thinks his colleagues in the press can answer. How, for instance, will they find out whether "[Obama] will take a zero-based look at everything and rearrange priorities" after the election? Are they going to ask him, and he'll point to his plans and say yeah, disregard those? How are they to discover "how adaptable is Obama to all of this? How willing is he to address these questions in real time, as opposed to later? How much time has he given recently to rethinking the scope and ambition of a possible Obama administration? Would he come to office with a determination to be bold or to be cautious? Is he the pragmatist that allies have suggested -- or committed to a more ideologically oriented agenda, as his critics say?" Is Balz seriously suggesting that his colleagues spend their time asking Obama is he's "adaptable?" Presumably not. Which is what makes his post sort of sad. Campaign reporting is an intrinsically deficient enterprise. It can never actually answer the questions that lie at its heart. It does not reveal to you the soul of the candidate or the arc of their character. Indeed, it's not clear if the candidates themselves know what sort of president they will be. Obama may want to be bold but find he cannot sustain that level of energy. He may want to rearrange his priorities but find he cannot afford the fight with Labor, or the anger of Nancy Pelosi. And this is the problem for reporters like Balz. They can't answer the relevant questions, so they end up answering a lot of irrelevant ones. Will McCain bring up Ayers, or who's ahead in today's polls, or how is Palin playing in Southern Ohio. They focus on trivia because they cannot pin down the substance. More scrutiny of Obama would not solve the problem. The problem is much bigger than Barack Obama.
