David McElroy

Ron Paul won 45 percent of the vote in a straw poll in California over the weekend, and his supporters are beside themselves with joy. What I can’t figure out is why such bright people are so fooled about something so meaningless.

There are three kinds of political polls. (Well, four, if you want to count election day voting.) Let’s talk about what they are and which ones matter, because many very bright people don’t understand which ones are potentially worth getting excited about.

The first of the three is the opinion poll with a statistically valid, randomly selected sample of the likely voting population — and this is the only one that matters. These are the polls done by the big polling organizations such as Gallup and Pew and various others done for major media outlets. These are expensive to conduct, but they tend to be very useful and reasonably accurate. The results can be skewed slightly one way or another by the wording of questions or by the selection of the random sample. Various pollsters make slightly different assumptions and calculations about who likely voters are going to be, but their results tend to be reasonably accurate — especially if you average all the polls.

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I’ve never been good at telling whether kittens are boys or girls, so I didn’t realize Charlotte was a girl for a long time. From the beginning, she was the dominant kitten of a litter. She was so dominant, in fact, that all of us thought she must be a little boy — trying to boss her sisters around.

It turned out that all of the kittens were girls. Charlotte was just a bossy young lady. (That’s her as a kitten in one of the drawers of my desk on the right.) The dark fur pattern of her forehead at the time led several people to remark that she looked like a Vulcan — with their angled eyebrows — so her early nickname was Mr. Spock. She lived up to the fearlessness of the fictional Vulcans from the beginning.

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I get varying reactions when I tell people that I quit watching television 15 years ago. Some people look at me as though I’m a alien from Mars. Many, though, nod knowingly and say, “Oh, I don’t watch the stupid shows. I just watch it for news.”

What those people don’t understand is that they’re watching the most dangerous thing on television. If you want to watch so-called “reality” TV or low-brow humor, I might laugh at you, but you aren’t under the impression that you’re educating yourself. You know exactly what you’re getting.

The people who watch the TV news channels, however, are under the mistaken impression that they’re being educated about the issues. They don’t seem to realize that what they’re getting is entertainment in a news format. They don’t understand that “television news” is the ultimate oxymoron.

This is counter-intuitive for most people, who assume they’re doing a good thing when they avoid the “stupid shows” and they instead watch news and similar programming to “educate themselves about the issues.” So why do I claim they’re mistaken?

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