You've got to pity the poor mainstream media reporters covering Hillary Clinton's campaign, at least a little bit. Well, actually, no, you don't have to pity them. It's a free country, right? So you are free to roll your eyes at the Clinton media gaggle without feeling a single drop of a small shred of a microscopic iota of pity for them. I apologize for even suggesting such a thing. Allow me to begin again.

I have to pity the poor mainstream media reporters covering Hillary Clinton's campaign, a tiny bit. No, no, I really do -- at least a smidgeon. They know full well that, barring any large and unforeseen events, they'll be covering Clinton's campaign for at least the next eight or nine months without having much of any "horserace" story to tell. If Clinton does as expected (again, barring a tremendous surge by Bernie Sanders or a sudden health problem for Hillary), she's going to become the Democratic nominee for president without much problem. This presents a deep quandary for the mainstream Clinton reporters, since all pundits (and I definitely include myself in this) absolutely love writing horserace stories. They're easy, they're poll-driven, and much like their namesake horseraces, it's always fun to see a dark horse pull into the lead or a frontrunner stumble or any other thrilling racetrack development that gets the heart pumping and the juices flowing. To put it another way: horserace stories are easy to write, which is why we get so many of them during each election.

Take that away, and what are you left with? Process stories, issues stories, and biographical pieces. These, in horseracing terms, run many lengths behind the easy campaign "who's up/who's down" narratives. Oh, well, there's always "gotcha journalism" -- another category of story which the pundits revel in revealing.

If I sound a wee bit cynical, well, I must plead guilty as charged. This is my reaction to the mainstream media's coverage of Clinton's campaign so far, though, so I can't say the fault is entirely mine. Because of the absence of a free-for-all horserace (as is happening on the Republican side), the media have already turned to navel-gazing self-referential stories, and that almost never turns out well (the mainstream media is notoriously bad at objectively covering their own activities).

But I'm getting a bit ahead of myself. Here's a rundown of the storylines I've noticed so far in the Clinton campaign coverage -- bearing in mind she's only been officially running for about two months now. To date (and to the best of my recollection), the themes of Clinton coverage have so far been:

• Clinton needs to formally announce her campaign, soon!
• Clinton may have announced campaign too early.
• Clinton slow to start campaigning.
• Clinton's campaign is too small.
• Clinton not talking to the media! Waaah!
• GOP reveals new Clinton "scandal," so we're just going to uncritically repeat their press release.
• Clinton needs a few challengers, we don't want a coronation.
• Why won't Elizabeth Warren run? Maybe she really is running!
• Clinton gets three Democratic challengers, whom we are now going to complete ignore.
• Clinton answers a few questions, but media still upset at access. Waaah!
• Clinton's poll numbers show she is invincible.
• Media dutifully obsessed over Clinton "scandals," why doesn't public care?
• Clinton in danger of losing Democratic base voters.
• Clinton in danger of not being able to motivate "Obama coalition" voters.
• Clinton too focused on base, should be courting independent swing voters and Republicans.
• Clinton pandering to "Obama coalition" voters by supporting issues they like.
• Clinton to start big campaign rallies.
• Clinton's lead in polls against every single Republican candidate is not as big as it used to be!
• Clinton slips in favorability ratings, but still outdoes virtually every Republican candidate on this measure (but we're not going to mention that last part).
• Clinton's first rally on Roosevelt Island in New York City difficult to get to.
• Clinton's not talking to media as much as media would like. Waaah!

I can even predict the storylines which we'll doubtless be seeing in the next few weeks. It's not all that hard to do, really. There will be an absolute media frenzy after her first big rally to lead all of this off, of course. Here are my predictions for the next batch of Clinton stories:

• First Clinton rally crowd only 15 times bigger than all Republican rallies, not the 20 times we were predicting. Is Clinton campaign in trouble?
• Clinton is trying to fool voters into thinking she's another F.D.R.!
• Clinton's campaign is too big!
• Clinton's campaign is moving too fast!
• Clinton does something funny in Iowa. Film at eleven.
• I didn't get a solo interview with Clinton. Waaah!
• Clinton leans "too far left," on issue where 80 percent of public support Clinton's stance.
• Clinton exploiting Chelsea and granddaughter.
• Women voters support Clinton because she's a woman, but Carly Fiorina struggles to get over one percent support (just kidding, we're not going to mention Fiorina at all).

All of these stories will be written while the entire mainstream media continues to ignore Bernie Sanders, Martin O'Malley, and Lincoln Chafee. This, despite their earlier wailing over the dearth of Democratic challengers to Clinton.

Think I'm being too harsh? I would actually argue that I'm not being harsh enough. I purposefully left off that list the truly idiotic stories we've already gotten about the Clinton campaign -- the "shiny, shiny objects" the media had a whale of a lot of fun chasing (sometimes literally). Don't believe me? Two words: "Scooby van." Or the obsession over Clinton's visit to Chipotle ("Sunglasses?!?", "No tip!?!", "Clinton actually knew what to order!", "Clinton didn't bug other diners in Chipotle!", etc.). Or how about "Clinton dyes her hair! Gasp!" (well, OK, that one didn't generate as much media obsession as the others, but still...). I also refrained from mentioning the media's reporting on the antics of Bill Clinton, which will doubtlessly become an absolute go-to staple for the rest of the campaign. I also have no doubt that my faulty memory has caused me to forget at least one or two of the other meaningless "shiny, shiny object" stories that have thus been written (please feel free to point out my inadvertent omissions in the comments, as always).

As for that earlier parenthetical about "literally," the funniest video (at least, so far) from the 2016 campaign trail -- for all candidates, bar none -- is the shot of the rabid pack of reporters amusingly running at full speed around a building in Iowa, just so they could get that all-important shot of "Hillary exits Scooby van!" (which would then, of course, have certainly won someone a Pulitzer for historic campaign reporting). If they had only been fast enough to get it, that is. I mean, sheesh. We need a new term in politics, one akin to the way actors talk about "breaching the fourth wall" in a stage presentation, when they actually admit the audience exists. What should we call it when some brave soul in the media turns the camera around and shows us all how incredibly hilarious the media frenzy can get during a political campaign? My vote would have to be for "the media getting Huntered" or perhaps "getting Thompsoned," in homage to the immortal Hunter S. Thompson book Fear And Loathing On The Campaign Trail '72, a book consisting of articles he wrote for Rolling Stone after joining the reporters covering the Democratic campaign in 1972. It's the absolute gold standard of breaching the fourth wall in presidential campaigns, which is why coining the term for H.S.T. would be a fitting memorial in the world of politics. As Thompson himself famously said: "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro."

But I digress. Getting back to the Clinton campaign, the basic problem with the mainstream media is that they're never satisfied with what they demand. Some intrepid reporter comes up with a "Here's what Hillary's doing wrong" story, then the campaign readjusts, and another intrepid reporter will inevitably write the companion piece "Hillary's campaign wrong to change tack," where they start complaining about the exact opposite of what they complained about last week.

It's frustrating, but then (to paraphrase that noted psychological guru Donald Rumsfeld) you head off to a presidential campaign with the media you've got, not the media you'd like to have someday. And part of my complaints today can easily be applied across the board with respect to how the Republicans are being covered (and how, inevitably, the Republican nominee will be covered next year, after their grueling horserace is over).

Perhaps it's envy. I certainly could be guilty of that. I don't have an expense account to travel around with Hillary Clinton for the next year and a half, that's for sure. So I am left with the mainstream media as my only real access into what's going on in the Clinton campaign. But still, I am already tearing my hair out at the almost-total lack of real questions being asked and answered by the people who are following her campaign around.

The biggest question -- one that even the mainstream media occasionally dances around -- is whether Hillary Clinton will be enthusiastically embraced by the Democratic Party base or not. She has already made significant progress in supporting some key progressive causes, and I fully expect her to announce a few more of these this weekend, at her first big rally. The underlying questions are: (1) will the base believe Clinton has actually become a progressive champion, or will many still be wary of her Wall Street connections; (2) how will Clinton handle the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, seeing as how a lot of it was negotiated while she was in charge of the State Department; and (3) how hard will she actually push a progressive agenda if she is elected? These are questions of trust -- will the base trust Clinton, even if she comes out in full support of populist issues? Answering them requires a deep dive into the psyche of the Democratic electorate, which I have so far not seen much reporting on (and that's putting it charitably).

There are other questions worth pondering as well, when it comes to making an accurate assessment of Hillary Clinton's campaign. The first, which may be largely answered this weekend, is whether Clinton has honestly learned anything (or even changed her views or positions) from her two-month "listening tour" launch of her second presidential campaign. If so, she will likely make references in her speech to "a woman I met in Iowa" or "a farmer in New Hampshire" or whatever. Jaded pundits scoff at this sort of retail-level campaigning, but Hillary Clinton knows better than most politicians the dividends that can be reaped from respectfully listening to voters. It's how she won two Senate terms in New York, after all. Clinton already knows how to campaign for president -- she's not only gone through the process from the beginning to the absolute end herself, but she's also seen her husband go through it twice, too -- so the big question is what she'll choose as her core campaign issues.

The other story I'd really like to see (and, no doubt, Clinton herself would really like reporters to write) in reaction to this weekend's speech is a comparison of Clinton's agenda with the "Four Freedoms" of Franklin D. Roosevelt. On the south end of the island where she'll be speaking is a monument to the Four Freedoms F.D.R. laid out in his 1941 State Of The Union address. Historical parallels could be interesting, because while Roosevelt's speech is now considered iconic in American history (his four freedoms: Freedom from want, Freedom from fear, Freedom of speech, and Freedom of religion), the interesting thing about it was that Roosevelt was really arguing why America should join in an overseas war. America, after World War I, returned to isolationism, and even after Hitler had romped through much of Europe, America still stood on the sidelines. F.D.R. was trying to convince America that there were basic human rights worth fighting for, but of course we wouldn't enter the war for another 11 months (when Pearl Harbor happened). So while Hillary Clinton is doubtlessly going to sprinkle her speech with a few choice excerpts from F.D.R.'s speech, there are a lot of possible angles for drawing parallels between the two. [Um, OK, there are several things wrong with that metaphor, from the geometrically-savvy viewpoint, so you'll just have to forgive my rhetorical excess there, sorry.]

The Clinton campaign is about to shift into a much higher gear. The candidate herself is going to have to open up to the media more than she has done so far. But she'll also now have the outlines of her platform to talk about. She's put in the listening time, and now she's going to tell us what policies she favors to alleviate the concerns of the citizens she's spoken with. This agenda will now be available for some serious comparisons with both her Democratic challengers and the entire Republican field. There are plenty of substantial questions for journalists to ask.

Of course, this doesn't mean these questions will be asked, or salient comparisons will be made. Instead, we'll probably get the pablum of a whole bunch of "look at the shiny, shiny object" stories as well as lots of pining for the lack of horserace stories. Because, to misquote Rummy once again, we head off on the campaign trail with the media we've got, not the media we would prefer. As we always do. I started this article off with: "Pity the poor Clinton campaign reporters," but that's just really a more-polite way of calling them all downright pitiful.

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant