Morning Must Read: David Weigel: The CBOghazi of Chris Cilizza (and Others): Journalists have no idea “what will matter” in an election.

David Weigel: CBOghazi: Journalists have no idea “what will matter” in an election.: “Chris Cillizza… defending [is] post he wrote about the political damage the CBO’s report might inflict on Democrats….

Here’s the problem: Journalists, in real time, are not the best arbiters of what people will come to believe months later. The fact that one party is spinning an incorrect story does not mean voters will buy that story…. From some previous instances of [Cilizza’s] the Fix pronouncing that some misinterpreted news item was going to badly wound the Democrats. On June 10, 2012, Cillizza confidently predicted that a gaffe you’ve probably forgotten about—President Obama saying that “the private sector’s doing fine” compared with the state of social programs—would “be fodder in the general election.”… In July of that year, Cillizza’s fellow Fix writer Aaron Blake explained why Obama’s exhortation that “if you’ve got a small business, you didn’t build that”… would be a problem…. Did it matter? No. Mitt Romney did not win the election….

The journalist—any journalist—is better equipped to find the truth than he is to explain how someone might lie about it, and how the lie might work. And a case like this, why would any new Republican attack on Obamacare matter than the 8,328 or so they’ve got in the can already?… What will we be reporting on a few months from now? What’ll the attack be? We don’t know. It’s boring to pretend we know, and much more fun to figure out then explain what the actual policy is.