Jon Margolis, [1] 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.

On Super Tuesday, David Brooks began his New York Times Op-Ed page column [2] by praising Hillary Clinton, but then he warned of “certain moments when her dark side emerges and threatens to undue the good she is trying to achieve.”

That a woman politician might “undue” her good works immediately raises questions about her “hairdue” and whether she is “overdo” for, among other things, another trip to the stylist. It also inspires interesting lyrical possibilities. One could rewrite fabled song lyrics, to make one read, for instance, “due due that vuedue that yue due so well.”

But, having said all that, let’s cut Brooks some slack. He’s been covering a presidential campaign. Only the fraction of 1% of us who have done that can truly understand the extent to which it exhausts the body and turns the mind into something resembling corned beef hash. But didn’t the Times used to have copy editors?

Nor was this the worst mistake of the day. On National Public Radio that afternoon Mara Liasson explained that the Democratic Party had created its proportional representation system [3] for awarding delegates “to keep an insurgent candidate like a George McGovern from sweeping winner-take-all primaries.”

Actually, it was pretty much the opposite. It was the pro-insurgent faction, in a process that started with a commission co-chaired by McGovern himself, who insisted on proportional representation to keep an establishment candidate from sweeping winner-take-all primaries.

The next day, Liasson told her audience that John Edwards could "throw" his delegates to either Clinton or Barack Obama [4]. No, he can’t. He can endorse and suggest. His delegates, once he releases them, may do as they please.

She gets some slack, too. She was on the air live. We ink-stained wretches get to read over what we write and then forward it to an editor who usually protects us from our own foolishness. Electronic media folks have no such protections.

But let it not be thought that only journalists commit errors of fact or language. Just a few days earlier, in her debate with Obama, Clinton said that “the difference between Barack and I pale in comparison to the differences that we have with Republicans.”

Between you and me, that’s bad grammar.

But before Obama fans start gloating, they should know that he said “between Hillary and I” in an earlier debate in New Hampshire. When you get down to cases, neither Democratic contender appears to know his/her subjective from his/her objective.          

From some reasonable perspectives, these are minor mistakes. Brooks simply committed a typographical error of the mind. Everyone knew what Hillary Clinton meant. And while factual inaccuracies may be more consequential than grammatical blunders, a little confusion about the history of the Democratic Party’s delegate rules misinforms rather minimally.

Besides, we all make mistakes. I do. In my last exercise for this page I spelled the late journalist Ed Lahey’s name as though he might have been related to Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy. Also a small mistake, if a dumb one. But at least I ‘fessed up, immediately to the editor and now to the readers. A search of the relevant web sites revealed no hint that any journalist and news organization corrected any of these other mistakes or took Clinton to task for manhandling (womanhandling?) the Mother Tongue. 

Were it not that the Times eventually did correct Brooks in its on-line archive version, the searches would have revealed no hint that anybody noticed that anything was amiss. If a reader/listener called, wrote, or e-mailed to complain about any of these mistakes, there is no record of said complaints.

OK, as conceded, they are small errors. But perhaps it is time for both reporters and candidates -- especially reporters covering candidates -- to adopt the intellectual/journalistic version of the “broken windows [5]” policy used by some police forces.

First outlined by James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling in 1982, the “broken windows” theory of law enforcement postulates that the best way to prevent major crimes is to prevent minor crimes.

“Consider a building with a few broken windows,” Wilson and Kelling wrote. “If the windows are not repaired, the tendency is for vandals to break a few more windows. Eventually they may even break into the building, and if it’s unoccupied, perhaps become squatters or light fires inside.”

In the 1990s, New York City Police Commissioner William Bratton put the policy into effect, cracking down on minor offenses. Some (though by no means all) criminologists give the policy some credit for the decrease in crime New York enjoyed in those years.

No need to get into the criminologists debate here. Whether or not “broken windows” worked in fighting crime, it would be useful in covering the news.

Consider perhaps the least of those offenses -- Clinton’s grammatical gaffe. Big deal, one might say. But presidents set an example, and it doesn’t seem excessive to demand that that one of those examples be correct English.

Ideally, the president should be able to pronounce “nuclear” (by now George Bush must know what he’s doing [6], and continues botching the word just for fun), get his/her subjects and verbs to agree in gender and number, and know that the object of a proposition takes the objective case.

It isn’t very hard, compared with, for instance, figuring out how to get health insurance to everyone. You’d think that at least one reporter or columnist would have noticed, and taken her to task.

Considering that at least a few of those journalists are pretty fair writers themselves, it’s unlikely that none noticed. So it must be that none thought it worth mentioning. It was just a broken window.

But if journalists don’t call attention to window-breaking, soon enough vandals will be setting fires inside. We know they will because they already are. For months, in press conferences, speeches, debates, and television interviews, John McCain has been saying (as did Rudy Giuliani before he dropped out) that the best way to reduce the budget deficit is to cut taxes, because lower tax rates actually bring more money into the federal treasury.

They do not, as almost every credentialed economist will attest, even Republican economists such as Greg Mankiw [7], once the head of Bush’s Council of Economic Advisors, an advocate of tax cuts. But no interviewer, debate host or news correspondent seems to have considered it part of his or her job to mention this fact, fact though it be.

It’s easy to understand this restraint. A reporter doesn’t want to appear to be taking sides in a policy debate. As Mankiw and others demonstrate, one can adopt a lower-taxes policy position without deluding oneself about its consequences. But that’s a distinction easily clouded during an interview, or maybe even in a news story.

But there also seems to be an assumption among political journalists that factual accuracy, much less good grammar, doesn’t count. This could be one of the legacies of the 1980 campaign when many reporters (full disclosure, I was among them) pointed out now and then that Ronald Reagan and fact did not always inhabit the same realm. Reagan believed what he wanted to believe, right or wrong. The voters did not seem to care.

(But no one ever had to correct Regan’s English. He was educated back when students had to diagram sentences and he earned his keep reciting dialogue. He was always grammatical, and though he mangled a metaphor now and then – “the ship of state is drifting very dangerously into a one-way street,” he proclaimed during the 1980 campaign -- he was articulate and often eloquent, even when hokey).

Almost by definition, reporters do -- or should -- care about facts, but these days most seem to think that it isn’t their job to correct candidates when they are wrong. That’s the job for opposing candidates, and the reporters merely have to make sure that they quote both sides accurately.

But that’s not being a reporter; that’s being a stenographer. Reporters ought not impose themselves into the story. They ought to impose truth, accuracy, and the precision of language, taking care to hold all contenders on all sides of all issues to the same standards.

If journalists do not correct themselves or the candidates when either makes obvious mistakes, no one will. In that case, the candidates, the reporters and the voting public will be, as David Brooks might put it, equally klooless.