The good news is that a lot has changed since 2000. Back then, there were only a handful of outlets dedicated to calling bullshit when they saw it—TNR and a few other lefty magazines, along with a handful of columnists like Paul Krugman and E.J. Dionne. Today there’s a whole cable network (MSNBC) dedicated to this stuff, dozens of popular liberal blogs, and in-house fact-checkers at most major newspapers, all of whom have been fairly good (if not great) at adjudicating these questions.

Likewise, in 2000, the Bush campaign didn’t merely sell its version of the truth. It also made Gore out to be a liar. This crippled his ability to question Bush’s record. (The strategy was very explicit. In his book on the campaign, Bush media strategist Stuart Stevens referred to it as “blowing up the aircraft carrier instead of shooting down planes”—the planes being individual allegations from Gore and the aircraft carrier being his credibility. Stevens is, of course, Romney’s top strategist this time around.) Meanwhile, the press played right into Bush's hand, running stories about Gore’s dubious invention of the Internet and trumped up claims about his dog’s arthritis medicine. Fortunately, the Romney campaign has had little success tagging Obama with the serial exaggerator label in 2012.

Still, even if some in the old media have been chastened—the Times is especially good at working factual debunkings of policy claims into its coverage—the rest of the campaign media leaves much to be desired. Outside of one fact-checking piece, Politico alluded to Romney’s tax cut plan in six different post-Denver-debate stories without addressing the substance of Romney’s claims a single time. Instead, the stories typically covered the back-and-forth over the proposal as irresolvable (“the quibbling over numbers aside…” went one segue) or of purely tactical interest (Romney had reason to tone down the tax-cut talk, another story observed, because the “'tax cuts for the rich' message polls poorly with centrists”). And I hate to single out Politico. Many of the pundits up and down the cable dial are much, much worse.

Suffice it to say, this is the sort of enabling behavior Tomasky and other liberals are right to go nuts over. The campaign media could never produce another story on tactics and the social consequences would be negligible. Everyone one of us is going to find out who won the election on the morning of November 7. But if enough of the media refuses to sort out substantive claims, how many of us will walk into the voting booth November 6 knowing what it is we’re actually voting for? And which recently reinvented candidate do you suspect is banking on that to happen?