Andie Coller looks at the media coverage of Barack Obama’s transition, and reports for Politico that the reporters seem only interested in counting to one when covering mistakes.  We keep hearing about how this transition has been remarkably mistake-free, but that’s because the press seems unable to remember past the last news cycle:

Team Obama has made its first mistake — again.

When Gov. Bill Richardson withdrew his nomination as commerce secretary earlier this week, NBC’s Andrea Mitchell declared it “the Obama team’s first misstep.”

But Mitchell had been scooped.

On Nov. 7 — just three days after the election — Los Angeles’ KNBC said Obama’s flubbed joke about Nancy Reagan and séances was his “first misstep.”

On Nov. 14, Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban wrote a Huffington Post piece on Obama’s economic advisory team titled “President-Elect Obama’s First Big Mistake.”

And on Nov. 19, Michael Goodwin of the New York Daily News said Obama’s secretary of state dealings with Hillary Clinton might just have been “his first big mistake.”

Coller has the right idea, but some of the examples used in the article are more speculative than fact.   Cuban’s op-ed piece would be one of these, along with the American Prospect’s discussion of the possibility that Obama might name Robert Kennedy Jr as EPA chief.  Those aren’t mistakes but potential mistakes, and even that is just on policy.

Coller has the right idea, though.  Bill Richardson’s withdrawal may have been Obama’s most prominent mistake, but there have been others.  Both the choice and the manner of the Leon Panetta trial balloon were major flubs, as the Obama transition didn’t bother to check with the Democratic chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee before the selection.  The selection of Eric Holder to run Justice looks pretty foolish now after his connections to disgraced Governor Rod Blagojevich surfaced, even apart from his participation in the smelly Marc Rich pardon.  David Axelrod’s statement that Obama had been in close contact with Blagojevich about his Senate replacement burned the transition team badly enough in retrospect after Blagojevich’s arrest that they had to burn Axelrod a bit in their denial.

And then there’s Hillary Clinton.  Before officially getting the offer for Secretary of State, Obama forced Bill Clinton to reveal the donor list to his charitable foundation.  Apparently, the transition team didn’t peruse it carefully enough, as at least one major donor appears to have gotten a payoff from Hillary’s pork.  Beyond that, she will no doubt face questions about the appearance of bias with big donations from the Saudis — and from Blackwater, a progressive bete noir of the first order.

Oh, and let’s not forget the transition vetting that apparently disqualifies people on the basis of gun ownership.

Is this transition any worse than previous transitions?  It’s hard to tell, since the press can’t count above one.  However, I don’t recall any previous president nominating a person for a Cabinet position that had already been publicly named as part of a federal corruption probe, let alone the other examples above and in Coller’s piece.  It’s certainly not better than those that preceded it, despite the relentlessly sunny coverage it gets from the national media.