would you like butter or margarine with that?

Clive Crook says that John McCain is toast [e.a.]:

A recent Gallup reading says that Mr Obama’s slender lead has narrowed; last week Rasmussen’s tracking poll called the race a tie. State-by-state polling, filtered through the electoral college arithmetic, gives Mr McCain a real shot at victory. All this despite the fact that the incumbent Republican president is deeply unpopular and the economy continues to tank.

How does one make sense of this? The simple answer may get me ejected from the guild of political commentators, who have a lot of space to fill between now and November – but I report it nonetheless. It is that these early head-to-head polls and the vast enterprise of political analysis, nit-picking and minute speculation they support, are, to a first order of approximation, worthless. In short, you resolve the paradox by ignoring them.

Instead of these worthless polls, look at the barometer that has predicted 14 out of the last 15 presidential elections:

Alan Abramowitz, a politics scholar at Emory University, has shown that summer head-to-head polls convey almost no information about the forthcoming election. (Subsequent head-to-head polls are not much better.) Instead, he has a simple “electoral barometer” that weighs together the approval rating of the incumbent president, the economy’s economic growth rate and whether the president’s party has controlled the White House for two terms (the “time for a change” factor). This laughably simple metric has correctly forecast the winner of the popular vote in 14 out of 15 postwar presidential elections.

The upshot?

A wide winning margin, which is what the barometer predicts for Mr Obama, renders moot all the detailed electoral map analysis of swing states, solid states, toss-up states, states leaning one way or the other.

Soon we’ll all be praying to the Obama Messiah, I guess—and this despite the fact that most people know that the MSM is force-feeding him to us and trying throw the race his way, as Rasmussen reports.

The belief that reporters are trying to help Barack Obama win the fall campaign has grown by five percentage points over the past month. The latest Rasmussen Reports telephone survey found that 49% of voters believe most reporters will try to help Obama with their coverage, up from 44% a month ago.

The loser, of course, is the media … not to mention the people who tune in to it—if they’re expecting to be informed, that is.

But readers of Infotainment Rules know better than that! They know that people just like to watch.