by Ana Marie Cox

I was watching "Meet the Press" when Tim Russert cajoled Barack Obama into admitting he would possibly consider a presidential run. It was a quiet statement, made in a manner both reluctant and calculating, just vague enough to never be held against him -- unlike his rather definitive pronouncements that he definitely WOULD NOT run.

To judge by the coverage of this mild admission, you'd think he rolled out bunting and turned up at a pot luck in New Hampshire. He's number four in Technorati searches and usually one has to send dirty instant messages to a page or conduct a Diet-Coke-and-Mentos experiment to get that high. Maybe that's next week. For today, the hype and attention given to the first-term senator from a book tour called hope says more about the state of the Democratic Party than it does about any candidate in particular. Especially not this candidate -- his not quite pronouncement could well be a head fake on Obama's part to spike up interest in his campaign and fundraising appearances the last two weeks of the campaign. The excited response, however, speaks to just how desperate both Democrats and the press are to have someone, anyone, create a real race against the presumptive front-runner, Hillary Clinton.

It may shock readers of the Note that the two camps (the party and the press) have different reasons to be wary of a Hillary lock on the nomination. Democrats fear that she can't win. Journalists fear that she'll put them to sleep. Covering a Hillary campaign would make oxygenating paint seem like a Tony Scott film. A disciplined and controlled campaign -- the kind of campaign Hillary could be expected to run -- makes for bored reporters. Describing the Bush-Cheney press plane in 2000, a friend once told me that the operation was run so tightly that once they left a campaign event at night there was nothing left to write, "So, basically, we drank... It was like a giant, flying happy hour."

Of course, a drunk press corps doesn't guarantee positive coverage -- they can turn surly if not properly fed -- but it can make it easier to, as the Bush campaign insisted, "get our message directly to the voters." Who knows: If Hillary will keep her contingent buzzed or bored or both, one hopes that if she does take her message to voters, she figures out something to say.