Rush touched on this back on Friday, but it deserves further mention as the race continues.

Walter Shapiro of Salon acknowledged that he had been covering John and Elizabeth Edwards for years, that he liked them very much, and yet now he realizes that he didn’t really know them at all – and that he had completely misjudged his character.

Five days after Edwards flat-lined on “Nightline,” I am still embarrassed by how badly I misjudged him both in print and in my personal feelings.
Beginning with a trip to North Carolina in the spring of 2001 to scout this first-term Senate phenom, I chronicled his dogged pursuit of the presidency both as a newspaper columnist and for Salon, as well as making him (and Elizabeth) central figures in my book on the 2004 Democratic primary campaign. My wife (a magazine writer who developed her own friendship with Elizabeth) and I had several off-the-record dinners with the Edwardses, including an emotionally raw evening in Washington two weeks after the 9/11 attacks.
Without overstating these bonds, I naively believed that I knew Edwards as well as I understood anyone in the political center ring. Yet I never saw this sex scandal coming — partly because I accepted the mythology that surrounded the Edwardses’ marriage and partly because I assumed that any hint of a wandering eye would have come out during the 2004 campaign. But then Rielle Hunter and the National Enquirer brought us all into the real world.

Shapiro is to be saluted for his late-breaking modesty and recognition of his own flaws as a reporter. But throughout the whole piece, there’s little or no acknowledgment of the same phenomenon going on again, with a different candidate.

Do the reporters covering Obama feel like they really know what he heard in the pews of the Trinity United Church, Sunday after Sunday? Do they feel like they really understand why he had a fifteen year relationship with Tony Rezko, and why Obama ought his house with Rezko, even after it was known that Rezko was the target of a federal investigation? Do they feel like Obama’s been honest about his relationship with Bill Ayers, calling him a professor who lives in his neighborhood? (“No,” Tom Maguire explains.) Do they feel like every last dollar Obama has raised is on the up-and-up, including the $1,000 from a donor named “Hbkjb, jkbkj”? Do they think there’s any reason to look into the small mountain of papers and documents he won’t release?

The press is being given this big, clear, obvious lesson: POLITICIANS THAT SEEM NICE AREN’T ALWAYS REALLY NICE. YOU HAVE TO LOOK BEYOND THE SURFACE. And many reporters hear that, nod, smile, and then go on to completely ignore a candidate falsely accusing his critics of lying.