If there's one campaign "event" that exemplifies nearly every absurdity of American presidential campaigns and how they're covered, it's the Ames Straw Poll in Iowa slated for Saturday.
Inevitably, news organizations treat this completely meaningless gathering (its results count for nothing) as a major development in the campaign, devoting more resources to covering it than they usually do looking into, say, a candidate's performance in his or her previous jobs (ie, things that might help voters make informed choices).
Moreover, the poll brings out several bad practices that continually infect the way campaigns are waged and covered in America (after the squiggle):
1) Sports-writing. This term describes the brand of political reporting that treats presidential elections no differently from any other contests, as if they're more or less boxing matches. Rather than see their role as revealing substantive facts or patterns about the candidates so that they may educate their readers and help them make informed voting decisions, sports-writing "political reporters" focus far more on who's up or down, who had a good day, who scored a point with a funny one-liner, who lost the day because of a gaffe, who is "climbing" in the polls... basically anything that permits them to cover the election in the easiest possibly way: as a fun, easy-to-understand contest where they can report winners and losers (of an election that is not even in progress yet, as it won't begin for seven months).
2) Predicting. One of the most baffling elements of political coverage in this country is the seemingly fetishistic desire to predict outcomes of things (something James Fallows describes in his prescient book, Breaking the News). Insiders regularly go on supposedly elevated venues like "Meet the Press" to discuss how a speech laying out a candidate's health care plan "will play" with voters (rather than analyze the actual content of the speech and how its plan might affect constituents), predict how much money a campaign will raise, try to figure out what a campaign's surprise announcement is later today, guess what someone will say in a debate, etc. There's the obvious objection that often these experts get it wrong. But more than that, why do they even attempt these predictions in the first place? Even if they were right, who cares? How does that serve the voter, who presumably wants answers to this threshold question, rather than betting tips. It's hard to understand what would be compromised if the reporters simply waited a few days to see how much the candidate raised, rather than guess it before-hand with no guarantee of accuracy. But the Ames predicting game has been going on for a month.
3) Pretending Fake Things Are Important. Campaigns are full of contrived "moments" and "events" that we're told are really important but tell us absolutely nothing about what kind of president a candidate would be. Most presidential debates fall into this category. What do you really learn by seeing the candidate stand on a shiny, glittering stage and answering predictable questions with 60-second answers? Is that something you actually need to do when you're president? The Reagan-Gorbachev summit meetings in Reykjavic did not, if I remember correctly, take place on a stage in front of bussed-in audiences, with time-limited responses. Similarly, the Ames Straw Poll, which we're told to believe is a huge event and major indicator of support, is not merely a manufactured contrivance, but... wait for it... a fundraiser for the local Republican Party (candidates have to pay to get on the ballot). And just in case you do care whether it is a major indicator of a candidate's support in Iowa or not (six months before voting occurs, mind you).... turns out it's not. Last time in 2007, Mitt Romney won the straw poll, before losing to Mike Huckabee in the Iowa caucus, and, of course, John McCain for the nomination.
So, as we're being inundated in the coming days with all sorts of noise about how important and revealing the straw poll is -- and how so-and-so has so much "momentum" now, while so-and-so now has to drop out -- it's worth remembering that the event doesn't predict anything, predicting things is a waste of time anyway unless you're a gambler, and straw poll performances don't help anyone make judgments about what kind of president a candidate will be (unless there's some sort of financially-incentivized straw-poll competition among nations we're all unaware of).