At the end of a post dismissing conservative paranoia about the polls showing the president pulling away, Jonathan Chait makes an important argument-against-interest:

The broader fear behind poll denialism is also one that ought to be treated with sympathy … The conspiracy may be crazy, but it is surely true that rampant horse race coverage affects the outcome of the race. It may not be original to point this out, but it’s true — campaign coverage devotes far too much attention to which candidate is winning, and far too little time to conveying information that voters might use to make up their minds. Instead, the horse race coverage takes the place of the substantive coverage, and the candidate with the lead appears decisive and competent, and the trailing candidate faintly ridiculous.

A good deal of what undecided voters who are just now tuning in will learn about Romney is that he’s a loser disdained by fellow Republicans. Conservative rage over this fact may be utterly misplaced, but the sentiment itself is perfectly understandable.

This is exactly right, and it’s crucial to understanding why the president’s re-election odds look ever better in spite of the fact that actual world events — from Libya to the latest growth numbers — haven’t been falling out to his advantage lately. There are plenty of stories circulating that might be expected to hurt Obama’s political prospects, but given the press’s horse-race biases none of them are powerful enough to pull the spotlight away from Romney’s flailings: They’re either big but not new enough (the lousy economy) or new but not big enough (the administration’s shifting Libya stories) to break through the campaign coverage.

The horse race bias has been present throughout the campaign, obviously, but it didn’t hurt Romney nearly as much over the summer, because there were more Obama gaffes and blunders to batten on, because the polls weren’t moving very much, and because Obama’s scorched-earth ad strategy ensured that a lot of the press chatter would be about the unseemliness of his attacks. But beginning with the conventions, we’ve had a reinforcing, oxygen-devouring sequence of developments — an Obama polling bounce followed by Romney’s clumsy Libya gambit followed by the “47 percent” disaster followed by further Obama polling gains — that’s made the horse race coverage the only coverage that matters where Romney’s prospects are concerned.

As I said in this week’s Campaign Stops column, none of this excuses Romney for running such an uncreative campaign, let alone for letting the “47 percent” remarks that may — I said may! — have sealed his fate escape his lips. As a presidential candidate part of your job is to be aware of how easily the horse race narrative can overwhelm whatever story you want the country to be hearing, and to do everything in your power to actively shape a narrative that will inevitably be shaped by the press’s zeal for “who’s up/who’s down” reportage as well. By choosing instead to sit back and play it safe for much of the year, assuming that the underlying story of economic weakness would deliver them the White House no matter what stories drove coverage in the day-to-day, Team Romney set themselves up for exactly the kind of horse-race-driven disaster they’ve experienced this month.

But just because it was predictable doesn’t mean that it’s a positive sign, for the press or the republic that it’s supposed to serve, that the incumbent president is suddenly gliding to re-election without having to answer for his economic record or explain what will be different about his second term. Romney may deserve his fate, but what Howard Fineman says in the Huffington Post piece I quoted in my Campaign Stops piece still seems apposite: Even if you’re unsympathetic to the G.O.P, it’s not obviously a good thing that Romney’s campaign troubles seem to be looming so much larger in the media coverage of this election than the record of the man who has actually been occupying 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue these last four years.