There were a lot of themes that came out of Election 2012, but one of the biggest was this: An important role remains in this world for real journalism. Anyone who saw Karl Rove’s performance on Fox (or was shocked by the presidential election outcome because of a dependence on partisan quasi-news outlets) has hopefully picked up on that a little bit.

Not that I’m necessarily in love with all of the election coverage from reporters who strive for objectivity. For example, there was a lot of post-election coverage about the Obama campaign’s skill at microtargeting — and some of it made it appear that this was a great new thing. In fact, it’s been around for many cycles, and Rove made particularly good use of it in the Bush-Gore election of 2000.

And as always, there was way too much coverage of and emphasis on campaign strategy. The usual narrative for this coverage is: The winner had a great strategy and the loser had a weak/lousy/poor one. In fact, I don’t think you can make a very good crappy-strategy argument since Dukakis ran in ’88, and even that claim is questionable. Presidential campaigns are run too professionally and are too well-funded these days for me to believe that strategy makes that much of a difference. The choice in this election was as clear as any election I can remember in a long time, and people made their choices.

I’d also make the argument that Mitt Romney did extremely well for a challenger. Beating an incumbent president is an extraordinarily difficult task — in my 52 years on this earth, only Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush have lost a presidential re-election bid (LBJ is a different kind of story). Romney got close to winning, although his failure to win a single battleground state was telling. Had he been a more gracious loser, I could have even seen him taking a third swing at the office in four years, when there won’t be an incumbent to face.

And another clear lesson that came out of the election, as it has in so many elections in the past: Occam’s razor is a handy tool. A measured reading of polls for months and months made it fairly clear that President Obama had a small-but-persistent advantage over Romney. In the end, despite some genuinely tortured claims about the weakness of those polls, they largely echoed the outcome. I wonder what might have happened if the effort that was put into deconstructing polls was instead used to address and help Romney overcome his small disadvantage. We’ll never know.

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