Why is the media more interested in Hillary's e-mail than in Jeb's profoundly dishonest tax pitch?

[Commentary] The formative experience of my political life was the 2000 presidential campaign, in which the media mercilessly persecuted Al Gore over a series of trivial exaggerations and now-forgotten pseudo-scandals while giving George W. Bush a pass on the fact that the central premises of his economic agenda were lies. Today it's clear that Jeb Bush is very much his brother's successor, both in terms of a love of regressive tax cuts and in terms of a passion for making the case for them in a dishonest way. And reading mainstream political reporters characterize the Jeb tax plan as "populist" or some kind of break with conservative orthodoxy paired with endless front-page coverage of every new micro-development in the Hillary Clinton e-mail inquiry is giving me a very uncomfortable sense of déjà vu.

The good news is that new policy-focused verticals like the Upshot and Wonkblog at the New York Times and the Washington Post are doing a much better job of covering this round of Bush tax cuts. The bad news is that policy-focused coverage of presidential campaigns remains a specific and at times marginalized silo. There is not yet any sense that Bush's economic plans -- and his sales job of those plans -- should speak in a central way to how we understand his character, his judgment, his ethics, and his overall quest for the presidency.