You get insights into presidential campaign news coverage from the darndest places — a pharmacy, for example.

I picked up three prescriptions, all packaged for me in one bag. When I opened the bag at home, I noticed one prescription was different from what I had ordered — they gave me something called doxycycline instead of tetracycline.

Not only that but the cost of the prescription was almost double, more than a 90 percent increase!

Outraged? Not really, I guess, except that they should have told me the tetra stuff wasn’t available and my doctor had okayed the doxy stuff.

The whopping percentage increase? Oh, instead of a co-pay of $5 I was charged $9-something for the 90-day supply, about a dime a day instead of my usual nickel. Not much difference in real money, is it?

And, by the way, did you hear that Mitt Romney won the Maine Republican caucus with 39 percent of the vote?
What is almost impossible to find in the news coverage is that Romney’s 39 percent of the vote constituted support from less than 1 percent of registered Republicans in Maine. He got some 2,190 votes from the 258,000 registered Republicans in the state.

People just aren’t showing up for these GOP events. You’d think the press might point that out a little more strongly, so that it sticks in people’s minds.

This site has carried previous reports of low voter turnout in GOP primaries and caucuses — maybe an indication of Republican dissatisfaction with the Republican field in general and Romney in particular.

But we continue to get reports of the percentage of votes received on primary or caucus day — those figures are inflated to 30 or 40 percent support or more, when the support from GOP voters really is one-tenth or less of that.
Did I tell you that I had to pay almost 100 percent more for a prescription I didn’t order?

And did you hear? Romney got almost 40 percent of the vote in Maine.