The Obama Swoon

Obama got elected without a scratch after his Republican opponent quit amid allegations by his ex-wife about being pressured to have sex at public clubs, and replacement candidate Alan Keyes quickly fizzled. The Post pronounced Obama "the party's new phenom" when he spoke at the 2004 Democratic convention. Before Obama had so much as taken office, he was on the cover of Newsweek, which put him in a league with Tiger Woods and Bobby Kennedy. But that was an early harbinger of a press corps that sees the man as an empty vessel into which its fondest hopes can be projected.

"The bar got set impossibly high the minute after that convention speech," says Obama spokesman Tommy Vietor.

Not everyone has drunk the Kool-Aid. Ken Silverstein of Harper's has a cover story this month questioning whether the senator is starting to cozy up to his big donors. Times columnist Maureen Dowd made fun of his "modeling gigs in Men's Vogue, Marie Claire, Vanity Fair and Washington Life." And Joe Klein, in the generally favorable Time cover story, said Obama is less than bold when it comes to policy.

If Obama decides to take the plunge, the free ride is over. As Page noted in his please-run column, the media will turn on him like a bunch of vultures. And they won't have far to look: Obama's acknowledgment in his book of having played around with marijuana, alcohol and "maybe a little blow" may seem a bit less charmingly candid in a declared presidential candidate.

Vietor says his boss expects tougher scrutiny if he runs. "For any candidate, there is a honeymoon period," he says. "When an announcement is made, the claws come out and research documents fly out of the back rooms and reporters turn a more critical eye on the candidate."

John McCain was the last presidential contender to cause media hearts to throb, but in the heat of the 2000 primaries, journalists started questioning his temper and his tactics. Reporters have a way of discovering a dark side of even the most admirable public figures. And if Obama takes his pristine image into the muddy arena of presidential politics, even the warm embrace of Oprah won't protect him.

Don't Shoot

Last week, this column suggested that investigative reporting -- the kind that has uncovered a slew of major congressional scandals -- would undoubtedly suffer as some newsrooms get slashed by 20 or 25 percent.

Now I stand accused of essentially arguing, "Don't touch this paper or we'll shoot these investigative reporters."

Slate media writer Jack Shafer draws a comparison to cities that, when faced with budget cuts, immediately threaten to close firehouses as a way of rallying public support. It's wrongheaded, Shafer says, to "somehow correlate the full employment of journalists with the common good. If there is a profession that doesn't think it's essential to the steady rotation of the planet around the sun, I've never heard of it."

Buzz Machine blogger Jeff Jarvis also weighs in, saying that what I should lament "is the refusal of newspaper editors to wake up and smell the latte: all the wasted froth that squanders their budgets. The newspaper has to learn what its real value is and that is, indeed, reporting and its editors have to stop defending raw numbers of bodies."

Not to spoil a good food fight, but I don't disagree with any of that. Some newspapers are overstaffed. Not all budget cuts are bad. Not every newspaper in America needs to have a reporter covering the White House, or London, or attending political conventions and writing the same pap as everyone else. What's more, lest they suffer the fate of General Motors by churning out gas-guzzlers, they need to move more boldly into the digital age, which probably requires smaller newsrooms than in the past as their circulations decline.

But many of the corporate executives ordering these cuts don't care about finding innovative ways to cover the news; they just want to please Wall Street by getting the payroll down.