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there always seems to be enough dirt in a politician's background to make that charge plausible.

People, emphatically including Rush Limbaugh, rant about the lack of courage of conservatives to confront liberals. But the problem is not merely lack of courage so much as it is lack of understanding of the real source of the strength of "liberalism."
The source of the strength of liberalism resides, essentially exclusively, in the acceptance by the people of the assumption that journalism is objective. That assumption is baseless. In the founding era, newspapers were openly partisan. They also tended to localism, since they had no independent means of obtaining regional and national and international news. But think of what it meant that the papers were openly partisan. Jefferson and Hamilton each sponsored a newspaper to support their own policies and trash the other's policies. There really was little to choose between those newspapers and party propaganda organs.
Fast forward to the era of the penny press and the telegraph, and newspapers had different market conditions. They had the technology to acquire news from the nation and indeed the world, and they - and their competitors - had high-speed presses with a large bandwidth to sell. But no individual newspaper could afford to operate a national and international news gathering and distribution operation - so they joined forces in the Associated Press.
The AP obviously had enormous clout in its ability to talk to the entire nation. So it had to protest its objectivity, and affect to be objective. And from that acorn the mighty oak tree of "journalistic objectivity" has sprung. Not from any rational reason why it should be believed, but merely from raw propaganda power of men desperate to promote it. And a public faced with the novelty of the situation, which wanted to believe it could buy "the world" of "what was going on" for a penny.
All the propaganda can be countered with a few simple points:

The wisest and most cautious of us all frequently gives credit to stories which he himself is afterwards both ashamed and astonished that he could possibly think of believing . . .
It is acquired wisdom and experience only that teach incredulity, and they very seldom teach it enough. - Adam Smith

Half the truth is often a great lie. - Benjamin Franklin
and,

"It is not the critic who counts . . . the credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena - Theodore Roosevelt

The first quotation makes the point that the claim of "journalistic objectivity" certainly requires proof.
The second quotation makes the point that such proof would have to demonstrate not merely that journalistic reports were consistently true, but that they constituted a full telling of the truth.
And the third quotation makes the point that the portion of the truth which journalism in fact elects to tell emphasizes the failings of people upon whom the public relies to get things done. And that, in criticizing and second guessing the corporations, the military, and the police, journalism "objectively" promotes the governmentism which it pleases so-called "objective journalism" to call "liberalism" or "progressivism" - and that "liberalism" or "progressivism" opposes both liberty and progress.
Out-of-wedlock births have to be talked about
Atlanta Journal-Constitution ^ | 9/4/07 | Jim Wooten

Oh, Clinton’s book is also helped by the fact that Dungy’s sales at Christian bookstores don’t even count toward the NY Time’s list. It made it to No. 1 without counting one sale at a Christian store.

Gentle Reader, reflect on that for a moment. Here is journalism at its most characteristic: The New York Times is systematically turning a blind eye toward books which most reflect American culture.
Why do they do that? Because journalism specializes in superficiality. People who don't want to emphasize the superficial and downplay the classic, do not want to spend their lives as journalists.
Clinton Calls out Bleeding Heart Cheapskates
Publishers Weekly ^ | September 4, 2007 | Lynn Andriani