I try to stay away from posts about poll numbers. Polling data is great to make a point -- I used them just yesterday -- but they aren't really a story all on their own, despite the way the media treats them. Current polling shows John McCain slightly ahead of or tied with Barack Obama. But this is not election day. We're constantly being told that it's only X days until the elections, but the truth is that it's two months. There hasn't been a single debate yet, Sarah Palin has yet to give even an interview, let alone a press conference, and people seem to have the idea that Sarah Palin is running for president. For the record, she's not.Where the media narrative had previously been that Obama "wasn't winning good enough," don't expect anyone to accuse the McCain camp of that. The new media narrative is that Sarah Palin is running for president. I don't have any numbers to back me up, but I think if you broke any media source down story by story, Palin would get more press than McCain. Which, of course, is the way McCain likes it -- being an old Washington insider running against the Washington establishment makes him a ridiculous candidate. He couldn't reinvent himself at this point, he's too well known, so he invented someone else.
I said I don't like to do posts about poll numbers, but they seem to be the big media story. Horse race reporting strikes me as lazy and not especially informative. Who's winning at the moment is a poor substitute for reporting on the issues. This isn't a football game we're talking about here, this is serious business -- the direction of the nation for the next four years. So it pays to set the horse race reporting straight when it's off the mark...
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