NBC's Chuck Todd just finished speculating about the future of President Obama's poll ratings and the amount of “political capital” the president has, and various other Inside Baseball matters. Not talking about the substance of health care reform -- what it would accomplish, and at what cost, and what the cost of inaction would be -- but about how he thinks the public will, in the future, react to policies and actions he isn't describing now.

Such a focus on polls and politics over substance is of dubious value to the news consumer to begin with. But I suppose it would in some way be defensible if we had any reason to think Chuck Todd is likely to be right about the polls and the politics. But we don't. That makes segments like the one MSNBC just aired pretty thoroughly useless.

I don't mean to pick on Chuck Todd here. The media in general display a stunning ineptitude in their political analysis, given how heavily they focus on politics rather than policy.