WH spokesman Robert Gibbs caused a small media ripple this week when he was asked Monday about Gallup's daily tracking poll which showed the president down three points to 47 approval rating. (On Tuesday, Obama was back up to 50 percent.)

On the company's site, Editor in Chief Frank Newport posted a response to Gibbs' mild swipe at Gallup's never-ending Obama polling data, and Newport himself raised several interesting points about the nature of polling. But this one seemed a bit off-course, as Newport oversold the significance of the daily tracking numbers:

But keeping tabs on the people's views of their elected representatives between elections is vitally important - and something in which the people of the country are demonstrably interested.

It's vitally important to know how Americans feel about Obama each and every day of the year? That seems like a stretch. (The nation seemed to manage prior to Gallup's non-stop presidential polling.)

But I thought this was even more off the mark:

Obama is set to travel to Oslo, Norway, to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. The White House is probably just as interested as we are in how the American public is going to react to this event. Our tracking will give us the answer -- both in the short-term and in the long-term.

Baloney. What the Gallup numbers will do during the days when Obama travels to Norway is measure the percentage of Americans who approve of the job he's doing as president. Period. Nothing more and nothing less. The notion endorsed by Gallup--that from the extremely vague job approval questions that we can extrapolate how Americans (in this instance) view Obama's Norway trip--doesn't really make much sense. If Gallup commissioned a poll and specifically asked Americans about Norway, then sure, we'd get some insight.

But assuming that because the job approval rating question is asked when Obama is in Norway that respondents will give their answer based solely on the fact that Obama is in Norway, again, makes no sense.

And my guess is that that's the larger point Gibbs may have been trying to make on Monday, which is that the press' obsession with Obama's daily tracking numbers (an obsession, BTW, that only kicks in when the numbers inch downward) is off-base because journalists read way too many things into the generic question. Just like Frank Newport does when he claims that we'll know how Americans feel about Obama going to Norway.

Not by looking at the daily tracking poll numbers we won't.