Has Bruce Reed become anybody else's favorite political writer? Because he's rapidly becoming mine.
This past week, the National Journal e-mailed its first 2008 poll to Washington insiders in both parties. I take part because I like Jim Barnes, the NJ reporter who created the poll, and because it serves a useful purpose: If the inside-the-Beltway conventional wisdom is always wrong, it's all the more important to gather a statistically valid sample.
During the 2004 primaries, I had a perfect record in the National Journal poll: Like most participants, I never predicted the right result. We're like the losing contestants in the movie Quiz Show: We guess the wrong answer every week so the winner looks like a bigger surprise than he otherwise would.
