Why must we be forced to watch a horse race? When you think about what this term implies you realize how off base our news coverage is. We frankly should not even care about polls. News stations should not even report polls. Why do news stations report polls? Do the polls actually have any bearing on how we vote?

A poll tells us nothing about Obama or McCain. I have watched hours of political news over the summer and learned nothing important. I know some many irrelevant things now. I know the trend of polls in Ohio, the names of the campaign managers, and the internal predictions of each act on the polls. But I still haven’t learned one damn specific detail about how either of these guys is going to do anything they say they will.

I must take that back. Last week I read an op-ed by Obama’s economic adviser in the Wall Street Journal. So I actually know what the effect of Obama’s tax policy would be on me. But this information was not repeated once on network news.

It is day two of the Democratic convention and it has been a bust. It was a bizarre mix of the inability to read Teleprompters, electronic feeds breaking down, and misguided speeches promising warm and fuzzy notions of sugar plum and fairies dancing in my head.

Government affects our lives. But unless the political parties explain to us the effect of their policies on us we have nothing else to vote on except personality, patriotism, and sadly race.

What is worse than this unspecific bull crap emanating from the convention is the media coverage. If the Democrats can’t tell us what effect they will have on our lives it is up to the media to tell us. That is their job. They are supposed to investigate for those of us who do not have time. They are our shortcut, our heuristic, our insight into the sprawling beast we call government.

Watching the convention has been like watching the opening ceremony of the Olympics. The news does little more than point the cameras at famous people and talk lucidly about grudges between people. MSNBC, which has been the lightning rod for criticism this year, isn’t even covering the convention. They only televise a few of the speeches – otherwise it’s just a bunch of talking heads raging at each other focusing on highfalutin issues that tell use nothing about what the candidates intend on doing. Though I am sure MSNBC would argue that they aim for a more educated and decided audience. Both Fox and CNN should be commended for at least showing more speeches but again they do little to explain what this means for us. Frankly Fox probably does this best, although in a very biased way.

The Democrats have not even had the chance to go on message because the media has only been covering the disappointment of the Clintons, the effect of the Clintons, the anger of the Clintons. The Clintons aren’t running for president. The policy difference between Obama and McCain should be what drives former Clinton supporters’ decisions of who to vote for. But if they are never exposed to coverage of policy differences they are left up the creek without a paddle. So is the falling of cable news a slave to profit.

I hope Clinton’s speech last night will shut up the media. The election is far too important for us to be wasting time on personal feuds. The media has a job to do and they need to stop reporting on high school style psychodrama and start telling us what effect an Obama or a McCain presidency will actually have on our lives. I, like most Americans, would like to vote on the issues and so far the convention has made it clear that the Democrats have no intentions of telling us what effect they would have on us so we must turn to the press. The media owes it to this country to forget the horse race and do their damn job.