The Associated Press spent a lot of time sniffing around the White House's travel records in search of a big scoop. I don't think they found one, but the AP did lay on the spin quite thick, perhaps in hopes of justifying the amount the time they spent researching the soggy story.

The AP's supposed scoop? Obama and his top officials spend lots of time traveling to “blue states.” i.e. They've never stopped campaigning!

The nut graph:

An Associated Press review of administration travel records shows that three of every four official trips Obama and his key lieutenants made in his first seven months in office were to the 28 states Obama won. Add trips to Missouri and Montana — both of which Obama narrowly lost — and almost 80 percent of the administration's official domestic travel has been concentrated in states likely to be key to Obama's re-election effort in 2012.

Wow, 80 percent of domestic travel have been to 30 of the U.S. states. Or, 80 percent of the travel have been to states that represent 60 percent of the United States. And if you look at U.S. population, the states Obama's team has visited probably represents at least 70 percent of the U.S. population. So tell me again, why the AP is trumpeting this as a big deal?

The AP also leaves out key context. It appears that based on its reporting, White House officials have not spent much time in sparsely populated states such as Alaska, Utah, South Dakota, Kansas and Mississippi. But have previous presidents? Did George Bush keep sending his top team to Oklahoma and West Virginia when he was in office? Readers don't know because “similar data hasn't been compiled for previous administrations,” according to the AP.