Presidential races require strategy. As they’ve become longer and more complex, they’ve taken on qualities somewhere between a marathon, a boxing match, and an advertising campaign.

Special advisers can help the candidates, much like trainers, coaches, and promoters. But still, a candidate has to have the goods.

These “goods” involve many elements in addition to stamina (necessary) and good PR (necessary) and prepared speeches that present a program and vision for the future that appeals to the majority of the American people (necessary). They also tend to include a certain innate likeablity and/or toughness, the perception of trustworthiness, an ability to think and speak on one’s feet, a sense of humor (self-deprecatory is especially good), and a past that includes both some sort of accomplishment and freedom from major scandal.

The press is required to document whether a candidate has all of this, and the candidate’s opponents are allowed to criticize any lack thereof. That is politics, my friends.

But some years ago there arose a vogue for trying to make political battles more “positive” and to avoid the politics of “attack.” This is unrealistic, somewhat akin to trying to have a boxing match without landing a blow. In politics, you not only have to say the equivalent of “I’m the greatest,” but you have to demonstrate why your opponent is not.

But even boxing has rules: no low blows. It’s the down and dirty blow that is rightly designated an attack; everything else is fair game and fair criticism.

So although strategy is indeed part of a Presidential race, not everything is mere strategy. Nor is all criticism unfair attack, and although sometimes it can be hard to tell the difference, it’s not really all that hard. Saying Obama is a Muslim is the latter, for example, while describing his shifting stands on NAFTA is the former.

And yet sometimes it appears that the press considers all the candidates’ moves in the light of strategy. And sometimes it seems they view all critiques of candidates they happen to like as “attacks.”

Recently I was listening to some talking heads on cable news. Unfortunately I don’t remember who was speaking, but the man went on and on about Hillary’s “attacks” on Obama this past week: the Rezko connection, NAFTA and Canada, Obama’s lack of experience in foreign policy. He then then said, almost as an afterthought “of course, she was also helped along by developments.”

In other words, by reality, by what happened, including what Obama may have actually done or not done, said or not said. It didn’t all happen in a vacuum! Maybe, you know, like, some of the charges might even be true (whatever that means). It might be the case that Obama actually does have a close connection that has been neither fully explored nor explained with a shady Chicago character who’s under indictment. That Obama said one thing about NAFTA, his aide said another to Canadian officials, and then Obama denied that fact. That as little experience as Hillary Clinton has in foreign policy, Obama has less.

The type of reportage that focuses less on substance and more on gamesmanship is rife, and getting more commonplace all the time. Of course there’s a place for some stories of this type, but they shouldn’t dominate coverage they way they now seem to be doing.

Here’s an excellent example of the genre, which manages to describe the current political battles without delving into whether some of the charges—the “attacks”—might be valid and have substance. Here’s a typical quote:

Obama, 46, is threatened by a pincer movement from Clinton, 60, and McCain, 71, as they try to halt his progress with similar arguments about his lack of national security and foreign policy expertise. An Obama insider admitted: “Whenever there’s one person versus two, it always makes things more difficult.”

Reminds me of a classic ploy in children’s fights: “Two against one! No fair!”

Although the article seems to imply a strange sort of strategic cooperation between Clinton and McCain, any “pincer movement” comes from one thing and one thing alone: the fact that these arguments based on Obama’s “lack of national security and foreign policy expertise” are a natural for any opponent to make. That’s because his vulnerability to such arguments is based on (gasp!) his lack of national security and foreign policy expertise.

The press is supposedly getting tougher on Obama. It remains to be seen whether this will continue. The sad thing is that it seems to have taken a combination of Hillary’s hammering away at the obvious, and a skit on Saturday Night Live mocking the press’s kid gloves treatment for Obama, to have motivated the press to finally ask some questions of Obama that they should have been asking right along.

Take a look at this recent TNR piece by Noam Scheiber, for example, on the subject of the press’s treatment of Obama vs. Hillary. Scheiber manages to employ approximately 1500 words to analyze what might be behind the press’s newly critical stance towards Obama without ever trying to ascertain whether the questions being asked have any validity.

What’s driving it all, according to Scheiber, is not the issues themselves, but a divide between two types of press: the elite corps and what Scheiber calls the “working stiffs.” The former consists of journalists from the NY Times and the like (no doubt TNR would be included); the latter consists of reporters such as those from the Chicago Tribune. The latter, of course, are also most familiar with Obama and subjects such as Rezko. According to Sheiber, “these are the people who pounce.”

And, according to Scheiber, these were the people who happened to have been in attendance at the now-famous Texas press conference where Obama whined at having to answer more than eight questions on the subject of Rezko. The whole thing is seen by Scheiber as a power struggle between the above-it-all media elites (with whom Obama displays a natural affinity) and those media “working stiffs.”

Here’s what one of the “working stiffs,” Steve Huntley of the Trib, had to say about Obama’s Texas news conference:

Try to imagine President Bush, fleeing questions coming at him fast and furious over a controversy, closing a news conference by saying, “Come on, I just answered like eight questions.” Democrats in Congress and liberal interest groups would be shouting coverup. The editorial pages of the national newspapers would be thundering outrage….Obama is lucky the Rezko affair is a Chicago issue with which national reporters are unfamiliar. And, given what’s known today, it’s hard to see how the Rezko case could wound Obama’s political ambitions. But for that reason, it’s hard to understand his reluctance to answer questions from the Chicago investigative reporters who know the Rezko issues best.

Maybe that’s something Democratic superdelegates ought to consider…

As Huntley points out, perhaps Obama is squeaky clean in the Rezko affair after all. Or, at least, clean enough. But questions about his involvement with Rezko are not just valid, they are necessary. And he needs to answer them with the patience that shows he understands that fact. After all, it’s not as though the issues have been thoroughly aired and he’s answered these questions over and over; it has not and he has not. There’s no excuse for his impatience, which does give the distinct impression of either arrogance or of something to hide—perhaps both.

Obama appears to agree that the stepped-up press criticism directed at him is really all about the press itself—not about any actions of his that he might be needing to explain. In other words, the press is on his case because Hillary (and “Saturday Night Live”) was on theirs.

Here’s Scheiber again, quoting Obama:

In Obama’s telling, the press’s recent friskiness was largely the result of Clinton mau-mauing. And so, on a plane ride out of Houston on primary day, Obama engaged in a little media criticism of his own. “I didn’t expect that you guys would bite on that,” he told reporters. “I am a little surprised that all the complaining about the refs has worked.”

Interesting concept, that of the press as the “refs.” It not only continues the sports analogy, but it subtly flatters the press by playing to their concept of themselves as objective and above the fray. Nobody ever said Obama wasn’t smart.