There have been moments in the general election when the one-sidedness of our site — when nearly every story was some variation on how poorly McCain was doing or how well Barack Obama was faring — has made us cringe.
As it happens, McCain’s campaign is going quite poorly and Obama’s is going well. Imposing artificial balance on this reality would be a bias of its own.
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I'm a registered Republican--as the late great icon Hugh Sidey, White House bureau chief for Time, once quipped--probably the only journalism director in the country with that political affiliation. But this article--interpretative journalism, by the way--is basically accurate and balanced, especially describing investigative reporters (which I still do, by the way).
Most political reporters (investigative journalists tend to have a different psychological makeup) are temperamentally inclined to see multiple sides of a story, and being detached from their own opinions comes relatively easy.
Part of that psychological makeup is contempt for boredom and spin (synonymous in this campaign), which is why Sarah Palin, if nothing else, energized reporters because she came out of nowhere and continues to be out of step, if not with McCain, then with conventional wisdom.
The best investigative reporters are conditioned to care more about the coverage and less about our biases--or who wins, for that matter. In fact, we sometimes overcompensate for those biases in the interest of fairness. And The Politico does that more often than not, with a sense of humor and self-effacement, as the writing here also illustrates.