I was underwhelmed to read Greg Sargent on Twitter correcting GOP hatchetman Brad Dayspring, who, characteristically, was caught in the act of twisting a distortion of a misrepresentation of the almost instantly infamous Bloomberg poll. Dayspring's very existence on Earth--which once served Eric Cantor as an aide and before that Texan Jeb Hensarling--proves only that political slime runs uphill. I once regrettably engaged Mr. Dayspring in a testy email exchange which, I noticed within minutes, was reducing my IQ by the minute; his personality truly made Thomas Hobbes' brutish nastiness seem short. I fled His CyberMalignancy as quickly as possible and with as much human dignity as I could muster.
But as to the Bloomberg thing, yes, it was absurdly overcovered and it positively screamed "Outlier." What was missing from all the coverage, though, was even a peep from the punditocracy, which knows better, about the pointlessness of national polling of a presidential race--unless one of the contenders consistently holds, say, a 10-point lead, which arithmetically means it's all over. Once one shaves a few points from the dubious 13-point lead that Bloomberg showed Obama holding, clearly that isn't the case, nor could it be, since this poll was, as mentioned, a rather singular outlier.
Yet the paradox of the Bloomberg poll was that its signaling of a substantial Obama lead might as well be true; if, that is, one tracks presidential contests through the electoral college, which is what happens to elect presidents. Obama has, consistently, held a collective lead over Romney in the battleground states, and when bundled with his reasonably secure 240 or thereabouts electoral-college count, he's sitting quite pretty.