matthew yglesias mocks the washington post's reference to romney's "delegate strategy" and atrios points out that the media pays more attention to the media narrative about the primary race rather than the race itself (the goal of the race, after all, is to get the most delegates).
this phenomenon is not restricted to the presidential primary. it's the same way that people talk about iraq. we regularly hear that the u.s. is "winning" even when there is no clear criteria of what winning is. whenever i read that we're "making progress", i always want to ask "progress towards what?" any country that will require tens of thousands of foreign troops to prop it up for 10, 20, or even a hundred years is not doing that well, no matter how you slice it.
sometimes i wonder if people forget that the words used by the press to describe politics and war, words like "wind in their sails", "picking up speed" or "momentum", are not literally true. an object moving in space in a given direction will continue to move until something else with enough force acts against it to stop it. in iraq, if there's no bombings in week 1, that doesn't make it any harder for someone to set off a bomb in week 2. a metaphor can be useful to explain a situation, but it's still just a metaphor. these narratives of motion that have largely replaced discussions of progress towards concrete goals often end up being more misleading than helpful.
