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All this racial squabbling among the Democrats is enough to make a grown man cry. How wonderful! That seems to be just what the grown men want to do. Grown women, too.

Better yet, that’s obviously what so many of the reporters covering the campaign and the commentators scrutinizing it want to write about – crying, whining, hurt feelings, claims of being misunderstood. Perhaps presidential campaigns and the coverage thereof have finally reached the place they have been heading for years: politics as soap opera.

Except there was precious little politics involved, as can be seen by the regular description of events earlier this month as a “debate over the race issue.”

Politically, a debate over race would occur if, for instance, two candidates differed over affirmative action policy. Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama do not. What transpired was less a debate over race than a collection of hissy fits, the taking of much umbrage, and all hands feeling sorry for themselves.

Nor is this tendency to self-pity unique to Democrats. Note how each Republican candidate [2] has called attention to himself as the chief target of South Carolina’s dirty tricksters. Sure, it was good politics, but they seemed also to be luxuriating in the sheer joy of being a victim. Perhaps every campaign’s real motto this year is the line Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller wrote for the Coasters in 1959: “Why is everybody always pickin’ on me [3]?”

For the Democrats, the first offense was taken in response to Clinton’s clumsy reference to the civil rights bill of 1964 and the movement that made it both possible and necessary. But that doesn’t mean that what ensued was “a debate over the race issue.” A chorus of caterwauling does not amount to a debate, and this chorus wasn’t really about anything, at least anything connected with actual politics. It was personal.

That’s what made it such a big story. Who cares about politics?

Already, stories about Johns Edwards’ hair, Rudy Giuliani’s wives and mistress, Mitt Romney’s religion, Clinton’s tears and cleavage have gotten more attention, if not more time and column inches, than stories about foreign policy, health care, and taxes.

On the Democratic side, this is somewhat justified. Because the contenders disagree so minimally on the issues, voters really are choosing which one they like most, and the coverage reflects that reality [4].

But whoever thinks that a sharp ideological clash would have made much difference has not been paying attention to all those accounts of reporters complaining when candidates take more than a few minutes talking about taxes or Africa. A few columnists have been so bold as to state outright how their eyes glazed over as a candidate droned on about some infernal policy issue. The trade deficit? Puh-lease!

Forget wonkitude, though. Politics can be substantive even when it is not about policy. Almost every news organization in the cosmos attributed Clinton’s New Hampshire victory at least in part to that moment the day before the primary when she didn’t quite cry [5].

Fair enough. The display of emotion probably did help her. But only a few reporters also noted that Obama might have lost because he spent the four days before the primary saying almost nothing. All that ‘change is coming, we will be one nation’ stuff can be inspiring the first time but platitudinous the third. Clinton kept answering questions from voters about the war and the economy. Obama did not.

In other words, there were political, as opposed to personal, reasons for the outcome. But a great deal of political journalism is less focused on the political than on the personal. So her welled-up eyes, his ungracious “you’re likeable enough” got more attention than his tactical errors.

So it was with the overheated response to Clinton’s remark that “Dr. King’s dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964.” It did not prompt a factual rebuttal or a policy discussion; it got Rep. James Clyburn of South Carolina miffed [6]. "We have to be very, very careful about how we speak about that era in American politics,” said Clyburn, lest they “denigrate” Martin Luther King’s legacy.

Clyburn, one of the more moderate members of the Congressional Black Caucus, did not suggest that such denigration was Clinton’s intent, or that she was deliberately introducing race into the campaign. But you’d never know that from some of the coverage. Most of the major newspapers treated the story with restraint, effectively acknowledging that what was going on was no big deal. But these days the parameters of the public chat also get established by the cable networks and their hired talking heads, by the op-ed pontificators, and by the free-lance commentators, among whom restraint seems to be regarded as a crime.

“Clinton Defends Her Comments on Race,” headlined MSNBC. The online magazine Politico [7] said Clinton was “dogged by continuing racial tensions around her presidential campaign.”  Introducing his public radio show “On Point,” Tom Ashbrook said, “suddenly it sounds like a junior race war out there.”

But Clinton had not commented on race. She was trying to argue that there is an advantage to electing a Washington insider, and she used a bad example. Were there “racial tensions” around her campaign, her black and white staffers would be at odds. There is no evidence that they were. And even on public radio, one ought to be able to discern the difference between a “race war,” junior or not, and a few people getting their noses out of joint.

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Then there was the reaction to Bill Clinton’s other anti-Obama line, the one about it being “a fairy tale [10]” that Obama had consistently opposed the Iraq war. Some commentators saw racial innuendo here, too, and speculated that he was mocking the Obama candidacy in its entirety, not just his position on the war.

Manifestly, he was not. But, again, a political analysis of what he said might have been more useful, and more critical, than insinuation about a hidden racial agenda.

Bill Clinton’s argument was weak. To make it, both he and his wife did what has so often been done to them; they took a phrase and a vote out of context to obscure the basic truth, in this case that Obama opposed the war from the outset, and she didn’t. But the controversy and the commentary focused on whether Bill Clinton had been guilty of what one columnist called “racial innuendo,” which he was not, rather on whether they were both guilty of intellectual dishonesty, which they were.

Most of this hypersensitivity about “playing the race card” came from African-American commentators. But whininess is an equal opportunity affliction. One of Ashbrook’s guests on that “On Point” show was Randall Kennedy, an African-American law professor and an Obama supporter. Kennedy said it was absurd to suggest that Clinton had deliberately “played the race card” because doing so would have been politically foolish. Ashbrook would have none of it. After all, he noted, she had the motive for trying to make this kind of trouble.

“She’s losing,” he said.

Actually, she had just won the New Hampshire primary and was leading in the national polls. But why let facts get in the way of the story line? Especially because Kennedy based his conclusion on mere rational analysis. He was just practicing politics. So 20th century. And then there was Hillary Clinton herself, who went on “Meet the Press” to complain about the Obama campaign’s “unfair and unwarranted attempt to, you know, misinterpret and mischaracterize what I’ve said.”

Poor, Pitiful, Put-upon Pearl. She knew what she was doing, though. That’s the way to get coverage.

Jon Margolis, [11] once the Chicago Tribune's chief political reporter and the author of "The Last Innocent Year: America in 1964," lives in northeastern Vermont, where he writes and teaches.