It's not the race but the campaign that bears watching now

It is impossible at this point to imagine an election campaign without public polling. Polls have become as much a part of the process as fouls are to an NBA basketball game or nuts are to a Jell-O casserole. However much they corrupt the purity, they're here to stay. Unfortunately, reporting on polls is, too, and that's something both you as readers and we as news reporters must be careful of.

The danger was evident in the wording of an AP summary we used Tuesday in creating a budget of potential stories for Wednesday's paper. With McCain behind in the polls, the summary said, he would be looking to that evening's debate as a chance to make up ground. Similarly, the Fox News announcer who served as host and analyst for the channel on which I watched the debate introduced the event with McCain's standing in "the polls" as the backdrop. and, at the conclusion, he framed his key questions in the context of the contest: "Did Obama solidify his lead or did McCain close the gap?"

There was, I'm sure you agree, something more to the debate than that. Daily Herald Managing Editor Madeleine Doubek indicated as much when she alerted our night news desk in the afternoon to the wording of the AP budget summary and reminded editors that if the lead on the debate story later Tuesday night had that same "horse race" feel, we should modify it to focus on the substance of the discussion.

On one level, this tendency is easy to understand and hard to control. The political campaign is a contest, and the very setup of a debate encourages watchers to determine a "winner" and a "loser." But the actual contest, as the politicians themselves have made a cliché of saying, is on Election Day, so all this ruminating we do throughout the process is, at best, a harmless distraction and at worst, an irrelevant influence on the outcome.

Consider the very context in which some writers and analysts determined Obama's front-runner status. The most recent poll I'd heard as of Tuesday put him ahead by 4 points, with a 3-point margin of error. That is hardly a reliable prediction of the race's likely outcome. Yet it was enough for some analysts to dub Obama the "front-runner" and McCain the "underdog," and set up all the attendant expectations of those labels in the minds of voters.

Thus, that kind of thinking becomes "the story" of the campaign, rather than the deeper and more relevant questions of just what the candidates' views and qualifications are and what they would do in the job.

Of course, the political campaign is a kind of race. At the end, one person will win and go on to lead the free world and the other will head out into the sunset to make documentary films or build houses for the poor or just go fishing off his yacht. The question of who might win is a natural component of the process at every stage.

But until Nov. 4, it is not the critical component. For you as a reader and voter, it's irrelevant whether every one of your neighbors will vote for Candidate A. What's at issue is why you yourself will vote for A, B or someone else.

In the thick of campaign reporting, we editors and reporters sometimes need to be reminded of that. And, when subtleties slip by that may seem to define a campaign not by its tenets but by its standing in the polls, readers should not be swayed. The tone and the popular progress of a campaign are natural features of a campaign, but they're not the campaign. With nearly four weeks still to go before Election Day 2008, it's important to keep that distinction in perspective.