Crystal Balls

The difference between political prognostication and predicting the outcome of the upcoming football season is that the pigskin pickers generally know what they're talking about and don't dance around the facts. And they're usually more accurate.

Yet for all the breathless analysis and number-crunching that has convinced observers Obama is en route to an epic victory, there is one key historic fact that is often overlooked — most popular vote landslides were clearly visible by the end of summer. And by that indicator, 2008 doesn’t measure up.

In five of the six post-war landslides (defined as a victory of 10 percentage points or more) the eventual winner was ahead by at least 10 percentage points in the polls at the close of August, according to a Politico analysis of historical Gallup polls. Over the past week, however, Gallup’s daily tracking poll pegs Obama ahead of John McCain by a margin of 2-5 percentage points.

I think historical data may be practically useless for these attempts, seriously. For one, campaigns have become focus-marketing groups, poring through the offal of polling data looking for this or that sliver to poach. In the process each party is essentially writing off 40%, and just competing for that last twenty. They always claim different, and they always revert to form. Obama may be a mild exception in that, but even then more in the results than anything; he would be less likely to try to govern with a 51% "mandate".

Let's face it -- if McCain were able to pull this off after eight years of non-stop monumental Republitard fuckuppery, of basically instituting "suck it" as an operational policy guidelne for everything from foreign relations to hiring DoJ staffers, he would crow about a 50.0001% victory as carte blanche. And he'd be right to do so. Power belongs only to those who assert themselves and seize it. Ask Vladimir Putin, either you have balls or you don't; only a simp asks their opponent if they'd mind giving up the reins for a while. [Mocking Homer Simpson voice: "Oooh, let's hold the reins together! Tra-la-la, here we go gathering nuts in May!"] At some point the battered wife has to get wise and either leave the bastard or fight back; capitulation to assholes merely emboldens them. They are never going to stop being assholes, because there is no disincentive to being one.

Perhaps more importantly, historic campaigns were not saddled with such a technologically-enabled cohort of media morons and polling homunculi tracking their every fart. Politico is a perfect example of this modern phenomenon, and Charles Pierce touches on the root of the situation -- these people have no off-season, so they spend a great deal of their time in story-churn mode, turning up meaningless things and pretending they're stories, inventing crude subjective angles through which to perceive the people they cover.

This is an industry that has sprung up around an entire subset of Beltway cyberloafers who do very little but talk to each other, find out who's gossiping about what, and "report" that, permalinking each other along the way. It's turned it into a perpetual campaign; they probably already have their templates set up for the day after the inauguration, no matter who it is. If it's Obama, he has to contend with the Clintons while building a consensus for the '12 campaign (instead of, say, finding out how he's going to be able to clean up Fredo's messes); if it's McCain they'll wonder if he'll make it to 2012, or if he should start grooming a successor. It's political Mad Libs.

“This may sound kind of harsh, but if the Democratic nominee were a white male from a red or purple state, the theory would be dead on that this would be set up, there would be a very, very high probability for a Democratic landslide,” said Brad Coker, the managing partner of Mason-Dixon Polling & Research.

Which is why, as much as it pains most of us, I still think Bayh's got the inside track on the veep nom. He inoculates Obama from the xenophobes and assorted Appalachian morons, bitter codgers who don't know their assholes from their elbows but think they know something about that uppity nigra.

Obama also has to deal with the hypocrites of the media, who barely conceal their crushes on McCain and their weird disdain for Obama. Republicans understand something about these media assholes that Democrats seem not to -- they are (well, sorta) human, in that they would rather have their egos stroked than simply do their damned jobs. McCain plays grab-ass with them the way Junior did, while people like Obama and Edwards, smart as they are, think they'll win these tools over by talking about how much better their ideas are. Dudes, have you seen what people will sit through on the teevee lately? It's either idiots humiliating themselves for chump change, or cartoon blowhards like Nancy Grace and Glenn Beck on a channel that has the word "News" in its name.

I mean, I still can't believe that Cokie Fucking Roberts, an old-money to-the-manor-born hack if ever there were one, had the gall to complain about Obama visiting his grandmother in Hawaii. Fine, "Cokie", suppose you tell us all where you go on vacation, how many more houses you have than Obama or the reg'lar folk you claim to speak for. It's horrible to think that some impressionable halfwit might see that, and think that such a person knows something about anything. The only thing people like that know is where to schmooze and starfuck their way a little further in their imitation of life. It's galling to think that a person with such despicable observations and opinions could make any difference.

It is all an epic bamboozlement, a 24/7/365 sideshow to distract people from the upward wealth transfer, the grand theft being enabled by the aforementioned Roberts and her worthless colleagues, while they line their own pockets, all without any identifiable skills. It's a pretty neat trick, now that I think about it. Where do I get mine?

Some separation and momentum should take place after the conventions, with the running mates picked and the usual perpetually aggrieved groups placated. And the debates should be an amusing blowout, not that necessarily helps.

It is also no small thing that Obama has had to contend with the Clintonista crybaby faction, a sizable chunk of idiocy that refuses to accept their loss, and will not stop stamping their wittle feet until they are duly genuflected to, at the convention and beyond. Fuck them and the horse they rode in on; if they fuck this up with their pathetic whinging they can count on being finished for good. If they think that throwing the election sets their gal up to swoop in in '12, they've been hitting the kool-aid nearly as hard as the Bush dead-enders. I don't know about you but I'd be done with voting altogether; what would be the point?