We can't help ourselves. Prop up a piece of poster-board with a "report card" grading the parties from A to F -- in big, hand-drawn letters, if you please -- according to their compliance with some pressure group's agenda, and we will unfailingly put it top of the nightly news. We know it's meaningless. We know it's not really news. But it's great visuals. Roll tape. Stop us before we shoot again.

So it is that the first week of the current campaign ends with the media, as if scoring rounds between boxers, declaring Reform the winner, and the Bloc Quebecois the loser. How is this? Did Reform make a particularly telling criticism of its rivals, or put its own proposals in a more convincing light?

Was the weakness of the Bloc's position exposed in some new way? Did we learn anything about either party that should make the average voter more or less likely to vote for it?

Not exactly. We learned that Preston Manning had come into possession of the Liberal platform, and released it two days before the Grits themselves had planned to. We learned, too, that Bloc leader Gilles Duceppe had visited a cheese factory, even put on a silly-looking hygienic cap, only to find that - - oops! -- the factory owner did not support the Bloc's views on unpasteurized cheese. Oh, and the BQ bus got lost for about an hour.

Objectively speaking, these events are of no significance to anyone except the people on the bus -- the politicians, their handlers, and the press. The discovery that Liberal security is less than airtight does nothing in itself to make the Reform leader more prime ministerial, just as the unfortunate bus driver's inability to read a map offers no fresh insight on the merits or demerits of sovereignty. They have nothing to do with the election, these fleeting media sensations, and everything to do with the campaign.

Or maybe not. This sort of hand-wringing about campaign coverage is at least as old as the coverage itself. In their defence, the media could say that they are merely reporting facts. It is a fact that Reform scooped the Liberals, just as it is a fact that the Bloc's campaign was poorly organized. Should we abstain from reporting the facts?

More to the point, it might be maintained that the way a party campaigns does tell us much about its ability to govern. In the plainest sense, a voter is entitled to assume, if a party cannot manage the logistics of a campaign, chances are it will be just as inept at governing. But even without such pragmatic rationales, there is a sense in which the success or failure of a party leader's campaign is in itself a measure of his ability to lead.

We do not elect a program, after all, but a government: men and women who must not only manage the nation's affairs, but lead us -- that is, to inspire us to follow them. If they cannot lead, they cannot manage. There is nothing terribly rational about leadership. It's more about taste than anything else: theirs, and ours, and the consonance between the two. Taste can be acquired, but it remains inexplicable: either you have it, or you don't.

Another leader, with a surer sense of political taste, would probably have avoided the shower-cap fiasco that befell poor Duceppe. But avoidable or not, it happened. Perhaps it merely struck a chord of unease that already existed, but it made him the object of ridicule. Those the public ridicules cannot hope to lead them. It's unfair, but it's true.

Perhaps that will seem mere rationalization, the sophistic in defence of the superficial. Okay: so here's the policy wonk's case for "horse-race" coverage.

By and large, a party that is unclear about where it wants to take the country, either because it genuinely hasn't a clue, or because it is divided amongst itself, will be just as vague and uncertain in its campaigning. The electoral disasters of modern times -- John Turner in 1984, Kim Campbell in 1993, John Major in 1997 -- have generally been well-deserved disasters. They weren't fit to govern, and it showed.

By contrast, when a party has a very clear idea of what it wants to do in office, and when it is united in pursuit of that agenda, it will campaign with similar discipline and force, and the breaks will go its way: think of the Ontario Tories in 1995. That doesn't make it necessarily the best choice -- it may be clear and united and wrong -- but it seems to rank high among the public's criteria: they want to at least be sure that you know where you're going, before they'll decide whether to follow you. By that standard, perhaps Reform is the early winner.