I love love love David Shribman's Sunday column in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette about the "Narratives of the nattering classes." Shribman lets you glimpse behind the machine that gives us our stale stereotypes about everyone in Washington so we can safely own and dismiss them:

Hillary Rodham Clinton is rigid, cautious and steely private. Barack Obama is dangerously inexperienced. John Edwards is a narcissistic hypocrite. Joseph R. Biden Jr. can't express a thought in less than 25 minutes. Christopher J. Dodd is making sense but nobody's paying attention.

But, then again, Rudolph W. Giuliani is hot-tempered and not particularly solicitous of civil liberties. Mitt Romney is a flip-flopping opportunist. John S. McCain III is a doomed defender of the Iraq war. Sam Brownback is a hopeless religious conservative. Mike Huckabee, too, except that he's lost a lot of weight, has a wicked sense of humor and, because of his second-place finish in the recent (utterly meaningless) Iowa Straw Poll, might not be the dead-man-walking everyone thought he was.

That's the 2008 race in a nutshell, and if the candidates (and the press) aren't careful, that's about all that's going to be written, thought and said about the whole thing. This isn't the first time an entire presidential campaign has been distilled down to the simplistic. Remember John F. Kerry? He was a phony Vietnam War hero who couldn't make up his mind about the Iraq war. And Bob Dole? An old guy with a World War II injury stuck in a World War II reverie with a World War II view of life.

The greatest danger any of the 2008 candidates face is to be caught in a narrative not their own, to have every misstep and every remark forced into an established storyline that brooks no change. Mitt Romney's father, Gov. George Romney of Michigan, is the classic prisoner of a narrative. Mention his name to even the most sophisticated member of the political class and, in a peculiarly cruel version of word association, the phrase "brainwashed on Vietnam'' will spill from the lips. George Romney's 1968 campaign was sunk when he used the word "brainwashed'' in connection with the war.

Stories lazily biting on the bait Shribman outlines are myriad. Here's one by the AP's Ron Fournier, which includes my favorite quote of the campaign so far (from NM Gov. Bill Richardson):

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton is too experienced, Sen. Barack Obama too raw. Listening to Democrats give their Goldilocks view of the 2008 presidential campaign must make voters wonder: Will any candidate be just right for the White House?

"Senator Obama does represent change. Senator Clinton has experience. Change and experience," New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson said Sunday, making a balancing gesture with his hands. "With me, you get both."

Here's another. You can more of the same from this morning's conversation between NPR's Renee Montagne, Ron Elving and Ken Rudin.

Bloggers in particular hate this and I agree wholeheartedly. Somewhere between helping people understand what's happening in the world around them, many journalists go a step too far and push a conventional wisdom, free of actual comprehension, on their readers/listeners/viewers. Shribman tells this story by way of confession:

I mention all this because I have sinned myself -- the job of a political correspondent is to commit this sin of creating a narrative from time to time, just not to make a bloody habit of it. Creating a narrative is how humans make sense of a complex, confusing world. But being a prisoner of a narrative is how humans surrender observation and thought for the sake of simplicity.