CHARLOTTE — During Barack Obama’s acceptance speech, I was simultaneously live-blogging for Yahoo News, tweeting my reactions (“The Lincoln line ‘…the world will little note nor long remember…’ so far applies to this speech”) into the ether, and worrying about getting a Friday morning cab to the airport amid the post-convention exodus. For those who care about my reasoning (both of you), I found the speech to be devoid of surprise, with little to prompt a wavering voter to jump up and cry, “Wow. I never thought about it that way.”

But as I hope I made clear during the long evening of crazed multi-tasking, my short-burst commentary was the aesthetic judgment of a former White House speechwriter rather than a verdict on the Obama campaign’s political strategy. My judgments were not much different than my personal disappointment, loudly expressed at dinner parties, with the Public Theater’s revival of Into the Woods for Shakespeare in the Park.

I have long been chary about making definitive on-the-spot political judgments (You know the type—“that sentence cost him Colorado.”) But this week in Charlotte, I have tried to be more resolute than usual in resisting the journalistic temptation to play armchair political strategist. The reason: I have been pondering one of the most provocative pieces on campaign reporting in this political cycle.

In last Sunday’s New York Times, Sasha Issenberg—the author of The Victory Lab, a soon-to-published book on 21st century political technology—argued that horse-race journalists are themselves lost in the woods when it comes to grasping how presidential campaigns are waged. Issenberg’s case, in a nutshell, is that over the past decade campaigns have developed new frameworks to understand how voters decide and new techniques to influence those decisions, and that reporters misunderstand or are ill-informed about these changes. He likened me and my colleagues in the clueless press pack to food writers who “remained oblivious to a generation’s worth of new chefs’ tools and techniques and persisted in describing every dish that came out of the kitchen as either ‘grilled’ or ‘broiled.’”

Issenberg contends that campaigns have been so adept at harnessing the latest research in social science—particularly behavioral psychology and statistical modeling—that most reporters trying to cover the horse race are akin to college history majors who suddenly find themselves in an advanced physics class. Up until about the 2000 campaign, he argues, reporters were pretty adept at keeping up with the last twists in polling, focus groups, and dial groups. But since then, the attempt to understand and explain the horse race elements of politics at the highest level has become unequal combat.

(This is, of course, the moment to disclose that I have had occasional lunches with Issenberg and have even—call the ethics police—wished the author good luck with The Victory Lab, although I have not read a pre-publication copy.)

The discussion reminds me of my all-too-brief stint as Time magazine’s baseball writer in the early 1990s. On the political beat, I was used to interviewing political operatives who knew a few campaign secrets (like the latest poll numbers), but whose understanding of the electoral process was analogous to mine. But in a baseball locker room, I was suddenly interviewing 23-year-old backup shortstops who had never read a book in their lives, but who understood the game on the field in a way that I could never fathom. I couldn’t even frame knowledgeable questions.

It didn’t matter that I knew the history of Merkle’s Boner or was an early follower of Bill James, the baseball stats revolutionary. What counted was not a fan’s pedantry but an athlete’s grasp of the diamond-hard realities of life between the foul lines. I had left politics, where I had already picked up 90 percent of what a smart campaign manager knew, and entered a universe where, if I were lucky, I could comprehend 15 percent of what the dumbest guy on the field instinctively understood.

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