Campaign news is like crack: It's best taken in moderation. Don't feel guilty if you haven't been following the election very closely. The horse-race minutiae is mostly unimportant and can be harmful to your health. I used to have this hypothesis that cable news made you stupider. Then I saw a host and his guest experts discussing, "Paris Hilton: Do people really hate her, or are they just jealous?" on MSNBC and my hypothesis became confirmed theory.
Watch the news to get an idea of what is happening, but do not take it too seriously. Get too caught up in it and you just might be discussing, "Mitt Romney: Can his hair overcome his Mormonism?"
It's good to have an idea of the broad contours of the race, but it's hard. The media tends to rely on lazy narratives to describe the election, so what you're getting is corrupted anyway. For example, Ron Paul (R-Texas) recently broke a record, raising $4.2 million online in one day. The story is absent from the front page of the New York Times online. If a so-called upper tier candidate had done that, it would definitely be big news. You can think you know the broad contours of the race but still be vastly uninformed.
So if the media controls what you know about the election, what can you do? One informative source for filling in some of these gaps is blogs. The good thing about blogs is that you can read them online in your room, so you don't actually have to admit to anyone that you read them. Then again, the bad thing about blogs is that they are blogs.
In the GOP race, you'll often hear about polls with Rudy Giuliani, Fred Thompson, Romney, John McCain, Mike Huckabee, Paul, et al. Rarely mentioned is the giant number of responses for a non-candidate: undecided.
Though with the general election just under a year away, it is still wide open. Polls and attitudes can shift in any direction between now and the primary and general elections. We really won't know what's happening until it actually happens.
If you don't know what's going on in the election, don't fret. I follow everything compulsively and don't really know what's going on either. All you can do is take a long look at each candidate's temperament, past experience and campaign promises and make your best guess at who you'd like to be president. And just say no to campaign crack.
