(It only seemed like 3,000 to WaPo readers.)

That's the mind-boggling tabulation that ombudsman Deborah Howell came up with for the just-completed campaign seasons. And yes, that compares to less than 600 issue-related campaign stories from the Post.

In response to her findings, here's what Bill Hamilton, assistant managing editor for politics, told Howell:

There are a lot of things I wish we'd been able to do in covering this campaign, but we had to make choices about what we felt we were uniquely able to provide our audiences both in Washington and on the Web. I don't at all discount the importance of issues, but we had a larger purpose, to convey and explain a campaign that our own David Broder described as the most exciting he has ever covered, a narrative that unfolded until the very end. I think our staff rose to the occasion.

Not to be overly harsh, but that's almost too dumb for words. Hamilton claims that at the Post, the staff had to choose between horse race stuff and issues. (It just wasn't possible to do both?) They had to choose, and they chose horse-race stuff overwhelmingly. Why? Because David Broder described the race as exciting right up to the the end. Huh?

Howell highlighted important deficiencies regarding the Post's campaign reporting. But no matter. Hamilton thought the Post staff, which gorged itself on horse-race trivia, did an amazing job.