There’s an old joke that editors like to tell about reporters, and it goes like this:

Reporter sits through a long municipal meeting, returns to the office, announces that nothing happened and then writes a 40-inch story.

Tomorrow we will see the national equivalent of that in Iowa.

It’s the same story every four years. Between Christmas and New Year’s, newspaper columnists type their little fingers bloody writing about how the Iowa caucuses are stupid and unfair.

Their reasoning: Only a small fraction of residents participate and Iowa is totally unrepresentative of the rest of the nation.

As columnist Matt Miller put it in the Washington Post last week: “Our country is essentially coming to a halt to watch what 120,000 idiosyncratic voters in an idiosyncratic state do.”

This, he went on to say, is like caring who the people in Coral Springs, Fla., think should be the next president.

Everyone knows Iowa is just one hyped up media event that supposedly propels or destroys candidates before going into the first primary election a week later in New Hampshire.

Remember the idiotic media coverage of the “Dean scream,” the unfortunate yelp that virtually killed Howard Dean’s presidential ambitions? That’s how random Iowa can be.

Having said and understood all that, the national media will still descend upon Iowa as if Godzilla had been spotted in a cornfield.

Reporters will corner people in coffee shops. They will visit pig farms and get smelly stuff on their shoes. They will sit on bales of hay and show endless video clips of presidential campaign buses pulling into crossroad towns with 500 people.

Rick Santorum, it is said, has visited all 99 counties in the state, the amazing thing being that such a small state even has 99 counties.

This, as they say in our business, is the horse race, and the national media would far rather cover that than analyze the candidate’s platforms.

Who’s up? Who’s down? Who goofed? Who made the mistake of saying something reasonable but contrary to the party platform and now must be crucified for it?

Adding confusion this year is the merry-go-round-like regularity with which candidates rise and fall in the polls. First it was Michele Bachman. Then it was Rick Perry. Then it was Newt Gingrich. Now it’s Mitt Romney. By tomorrow it might very well be Rick Santorum or Ron Paul.

Does any of this give you faith that voters are truly selecting the best candidate, either for the country or for their party?

Yet, as crazy as it all seems, this is what the process has become — an ugly, imprecise, illogical yearlong slog to the big day in November when we all go to the polls and select the next president.

Just think, only 310 days to go!

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The opinions expressed in this column reflect the views of the ownership and editorial board.