The implications of this coming tax fight will dwarf any domestic issue in Campaign 2012—with the possible exception of the future of health-care reform. But little of this has been reflected in the campaign coverage. Instead, what we get are boilerplate paragraphs about how Romney wants to extend all the Bush tax cuts while Obama wants to roll them back for the affluent. Missing from all of this is a discussion of how Obama or Romney could use the expiration of the Bush tax cuts as a lever to enact far-reaching tax reform rather than just re-jiggering rates.

What I find exasperating is the obtuse literalness of most campaign issue coverage. If a candidate or a designated spokesman doesn’t talk about it, then it doesn’t exist for much of the press. Part of the problem, I suspect, is that the lingering constraints of objective journalism discourage speculation when it comes to issues and 2013 policymaking in the White House. Reporters, of course, can go crazy with hypotheticals when it comes to horse-race coverage, but issues somehow require a return to Dragnet-style “just the facts, ma’am” reporting.

But facts—as defined by candidate statements, campaign position papers or even Congressional Budget Office analysis—are different than truth.

Recent political history is riddled with examples of presidential candidates who reversed field once they were in the White House. George W. Bush rejected nation-building in his 2000 debate with Al Gore, and Obama ridiculed a healthcare mandate in his primary debates with Hillary Clinton. No one covering the 2008 campaign predicted (as far as I know) that President Obama would embrace drone attacks with a cold-eyed fervor worthy of Dick Cheney.

Coverage of campaign policy advisers presents its own challenges. After he won the GOP nomination in 2000, Bush used every communications technique, with the possible exception of skywriting, to signal that Colin Powell would be his secretary of State. Nothing, of course, prepared voters for the reality that in a War Cabinet dominated by Cheney, Powell would play the feckless moderate.

During the 2008 campaign, I recall attending a series of Obama foreign-policy briefings featuring former Clinton national security adviser Tony Lake, former Secretary of the Navy Richard Danzig, and Washington lawyer Greg Craig, who served in the Clinton State Department. Neither Lake nor Danzig went into the Obama administration, while Craig had a short and unhappy tenure as White House counsel. But so much of the early press coverage of Obama foreign policy revolved around these three men, who ended up playing no lasting roles on the president’s national security team.

Please understand: I have not brandished these examples as an argument for abandoning campaign issues coverage. My point, instead, is that the old ways haven’t worked, with their emphasis on campaign position papers, policy speeches, and the candidate’s official team of blue-ribbon advisers.

What we need in covering the policy components of a presidential campaign is a burst of creativity—a way of creating plausible scenarios about a would-be president that go beyond analyzing campaign handouts and searching for independent economic projections.

More than anything, this is what journalists should strive to offer voters in a presidential election year, rather than the towel-snapping locker-room controversies that dominate political coverage. We needs ways to vividly picture President Romney, and to depict a reelected President Obama surrounded by a largely new policy team. Yes, reporters will make mistakes in taking these bold leaps into the post-election future. But, remember, the traditional methods of covering campaign issues have brought voters neither intellectual nourishment nor truth.

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