Any cop or lawyer can tell you that when two or more people witness the same event they are likely to come away with quite different versions of what they saw. So it is with a pastor’s interviews with the Presidential candidates at Saddleback church Saturday night..

The New York Times’ conservative columnist William Kristol reported that Obama offered “windy generalities” in his answers, while McCain’s were “crisp and colorful.” No surprise there, as judged by his own writings Kristol is unlikely to appreciate the spectacle of a thoughtful nuanced mind at work – Obama’s – and therefore to favor simplistic, one-syllable answers from the GOP’s standard-bearer. .

But when a major network’s star reporter such as NBC’s Andrea Mitchell takes the same tack as Kristol’s it’s different. Speaking on Meet the Press, she opined that Obama’s people “must feel that he didn’t do quite as well as he might have wanted,” a comment that was picked up by Kristol to support his own contention – in the circuitous way that even the crudest idea can travel from one media point to another and thus reinforce itself in Washington.

Pastor Rick Warren asked both candidates the same questions in one-on-one interviews. Obama went first. To keep McCain from knowing the questions in advance, McCain was supposed to be somewhere in the building where he couldn’t hear them. When McCain was brought onto the stage, the pastor asked how it was in his “cone of silence,” and McCain replied jokingly that “I was trying to hear through the wall.”

It was later revealed that in fact McCain was in his motorcade on the way to the church while Obama was interviewed. This opened the possibility that McCain could have been listening to the broadcast and thus known in advance what would be asked. When Andrea Mitchell referred to this possibility, and noted that “McCain seemed so well prepared,”she drew an outraged response from the McCain campaign. This was a rare occasion when Mitchell deigned to step on the toes of the Republican candidate, though in this case she was clearly justified in doing so.

I have long had my doubts about Andrea Mitchell’s reporting, and wonder why NBC has assigned her to major beats like foreign policy and politics and granted her long gobs of airtime denied to many of her colleagues..Much of her reporting fails to challenge conventional wisdom, and I have noted a creeping bias in favor of Republicans or at least Republican market-oriented ideas. Whatever attack phrases emanate from the Republican campaign are quickly echoed by Mitchell, phrases like “flip-flop”, “celebrity,” and “race card,” come to mind. And in her role as anchor at one of MSNBC’s politics shows, she compounds the attacks by asking panelists to talk about them.

Perhaps it’s because, as the wife of Alan Greenspan, Mitchell sups at his well every day over her morning bacon and eggs. Greenspan, the partial architect of our present economic woes, is a long-time fan of free-market Tory Ayn Rand and an avowed Republican himself. Maybe it’s a bit unfair to tar the wife with the husband’s proclivities and vice versa, but no doubt as Greenspan’s wife she is more likely to be dining with the moneyed Republican crowd than she is at the local McDonald’s where she might be exposed to alternate points of view.

At any rate, there’s something about the seeming impropriety of this arrangement that should give the NBC News division reason to pause.

As for the Saddleback event, as viewed not in terms of the political horse race,but rather as a peek into the minds of the two candidates, it was useful. One candidate seemed to recognize that most of the problems he would be facing in the White House were complex and difficult, while the other offered jokes and one-liners, and the telling information that he would be lean on the CEO at e-Bay for advice on how to run the country. Even the likes of Mitchell and Kristol should be able to tell the difference.