One last comment on the forthcoming election. Lord, I will be happy when this is behind
us. Unless Obama loses, in which case I
must decide whether to kill myself or buy a one way ticket to Paris.
The entire campaign has been really bizarre, and I have been
trying very hard to make sense of it. I
have come up with an explanation, which may have some truth in it. I offer it simply as a sop to those of you
who, like me, are way beyond obsession and into hysteria, and hence need
something to calm us down.
The focus of my puzzlement has been the sudden dramatic
collapse of Obama's very large lead on the occasion of the first debate. Since all the polling suggested that the
country was dramatically polarized, with an unusually small number of respondents
to the polls identifying themselves as "undecided," I simply could
not make sense of the dramatic reversal of fortunes as a consequence of one listless
debate performance. Had there been a
large number of undecided voters, the reversals might have been comprehensible,
but how could Obama virtually overnight go, in Nate Silver's excellent
statistical analysis, from an 87.1% chance of victory to a 61.1% chance? [He is back up to a 74.4% chance, thank the
Lord.]
There are, it seems to me, only two possible
explanations. The first, which I do not
believe at all, is that the polls either before or after the debate were cooked
or incompetently conducted. That way
lies paranoia and madness. The second,
which I have decided is the only explanation that makes sense, is this: From the beginning, the race was going to be
very close. A bad Republican primary
season and some unforced Romney errors influenced inattentive voters unduly
before the post-Labor Day period, yielding unrealistic poll numbers that made
it look as though Obama was going to run away with the election. The arrival of the real election season
coincided with Obama's poor showing in the first debate to jolt natural Romney
supporters back to the position they were destined to occupy anyway. They were never really persuadable by the Democrats. So, after the second and third debates more
or less equalized the situation, the polls began to show pretty much the sort
of tight race that it was always going to be, with Obama in a small but solid
lead.
This explanation has the great advantage, I think, of
comporting with the expectations of the Obama campaign team, who are, in my
experience, the smartest bunch of pros modern American politics has ever
seen. From the outset, they were sure
they would be facing Romney, they were convinced that he was the strongest
candidate the Republicans could put forward, and they thought they would have a
turnout election in which their best chance of success was a superb ground
game.
There are now no more turning points, no more startling
revelations, just a grinding effort to get out the vote, early if possible but
otherwise on election day. My sunny
optimism, which reached its peak in my happy blog post that Obama would win and
Romney would lose, has given way to a sullen, determined, gut-wrenching slog
from news cycle to news cycle as I await Election Day. My pricey bottle of Chateau neuf du Pape will
remain unopened until Obama takes Ohio, or at least New Hampshire.
In the next ten days, I will strive to find something else
to blog about.
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