A newspaper endorsement that may matter

Most newspaper endorsements mostly don’t matter. The Washington Post on Friday endorsed Barack Obama; I confess that as much as I admire the editorial writers of the Washington Post (and I do) I haven’t read it yet. The Post, as I recall, has regularly endorsed Democratic candidates for a long time, although in 1988, when I was on the editorial page staff, it chose not to endorse either Michael Dukakis or George H. W. Bush, a stand that I think was logical in light of the paper’s editorial page stances—generally but not always liberal, often thoughtful in an intellectually interesting way—over the years.