Almost everyone I know in the netherworld of political hipsterdom either agonizes or exults or plunges into deep swami-like meditation with every presidential poll that pops up on the internet or TV screen.

My advice to all, on either side of the aisle, is save yourself the agony and forego the ecstasy. Worry about gasoline prices, paying off your mortgage, the state or nonstate of your love-life—anything but the polls.

Forget them.

They have no meaning now whatsoever. Do not permit your shorts to get into a bunch about something so fleeting and ultimately without merit as a poll nearly five months from Election Day.

Remember how far ahead of the pack Hillary Clinton was just five months ago? And how Rudy Guiliani was a shoo-in?

So most of the polls show Barack Obama ahead by four to six points. If this were November 1 that might be meaningful. But even then, as those old enough to remember the year 2000 will recollect, it is not the national percentages that count, but the cumulative totals of the Electoral College.

Even then, a six-point lead for Obama might not be sufficient. Unless a national poll were magically corrected for state-by-state performance, Obama might need to show something closer to a 10-point lead in order to win.

First, we have seen the so-called “Bradley effect” in play this year, where people tell pollsters they will vote or have voted for an African American but it turns out to be a lie. Also, even if everyone were perfectly truthful, a substantial portion of Obama’s vote is concentrated in relatively few congressional districts.

Thus, in broad strokes, he might hypothetically carry Illinois by 30 points but lose Pennsylvania, Ohio and Florida by 1 point each. The national polls would have him ahead, while he could be smashed in the Electoral College.

Please note: I cite this not as any kind of prediction—at this juncture I still believe he will win—but simply to show the potential folly of the so-called national poll.

At this early stage I would also take those individual state poll with several grains of salt. Certainly any considered to be a marginal or battleground state.

Forget, too, about poll “averaging.” Just consider the final polling in February’s California primary: the polling firm Survey USA had Clinton ahead by 10 points while Zogby had Obama ahead by the same margin. An average suggested a dead heat. But Zogby was dead wrong; Survey USA was dead on the money.

Be especially forgetful about “internals” of the polls. One big-time poll recently showed Obama ahead with all women, but lagging McCain among a subset of suburban women by 12 points.

What they didn’t tell you was that, although the overall poll’s margin of error was plus or minus 3 points, the subset sample of suburban women was so small that the margin of error was plus or minus 10 points—in other words, a meaningless statistic that the cable-babblers babbled about for days.

I am not dissing polls altogether, by any means. What I am suggesting is that we have yet to have the conventions, we have yet to know the vice-presidential choices, we have yet to see much of a general election campaign. Moreover, the essence of that campaign—where the candidates and their commercials really begin to define the opposition—has not yet begun.

My final word to political hipsterdom is that all the polling until about mid-September is no more predictive of the outcome than the first five minutes of an NBA basketball game. Unless, that is, you see a serious pattern emerging—such as, say, Obama gaining two points a week or vice-versa.

The only person I know who is happy that the polls are causing so much anxiety is my friend Harvey the Shrink. It’s so good for business he’s about to put Zogby on his payroll.

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Don Rose is a veteran liberal campaign strategist, a onetime press secretary for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. who has been reading political polls most of his adult life. He is a regular political columnist for The Chicago Daily Observer.