Every couple of days or so CNN.com posts a headline reading something like PALIN IN TROUBLE or POLL SPELLS DOOM FOR PALIN.
Today’s is: BAD NEWS FOR PALIN
So what’s the bad news? Did her gun get stolen? Is she pregnant with baby No. 73?
No. According to the latest poll, Barack Obama and Sarah Palin are “going in different directions.”
Says the piece: “According to a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey released Tuesday, 78 percent of Democrats questioned in the poll say they want to see Obama at the top of their party’s ticket in 2012, with only 19 percent saying they would prefer someone else as the Democratic presidential nominee. The 19 percent figure is the lowest figure since March, when the question was first asked.”
Look, I love hearing any bad news for Sarah Palin (not death or anything, of course), because I can’t stand her. But a poll taken, ahem, two years before an election that probably won’t happen is ludicrous. It actually represents something I loathe about the mainstream media’s political coverage, which is the whole catch-a-wave-and-go-with-it approach to reporting. Were this poll taken a week before the election—sure, it’s bad news. But now, in December 2010, it’s utterly meaningless. Obama is on an upswing because he had, unambiguously, a couple of HUGE weeks. In the future, he’ll have many shitty weeks, too. And the polls will change. And change again. And change again again.
It’s meaningless.
