Please stop the madness

Can't we please have at least a two-year moratorium on these asinine "who will you vote for in 2008" polls? As the Carpetbagger so appropriately points out,

I see this morning that there’s a new Zogby poll (not yet online), conducted for a Democratic firm called WhatsNext Communications, on how Dem voters feel about prospective presidential candidates in 2008.

[snip]

It got me thinking: how did the polls look at this point four years ago, looking ahead to the 2004 race? Not surprisingly, voters’ preferences so far in advance proved to be of little value at the time, which should give us a pretty big hint about how valuable these polls are now.

Zogby, for example, did a poll shortly after the end of the 2000 race about Dem preferences for the next cycle. Only seven candidates were above 1%. Gore led with 36%, followed by Hillary at 18%, Bill Bradley at 7%, Dick Gephardt at 5%, Jesse Jackson at 5%, Bob Kerrey at 3%, and Joe Lieberman at 3%. In other words, the top four candidates from the 2004 cycle – Kerry, Edwards, Clark, and Dean – weren’t mentioned at all four years before they led the field.

I mean, what is the point? Can we - literally - give it a rest?