How, you ask, feeling the same sense of either surging joy or silent, lugubrious declension (in my case: silent, lugubrious declension), do I know that my little, khaki Idahoan has been consigned an inauspicious demise beneath the vermilion glow of a heat lamp?
Gallup now has Obama's lead between 7-8 percent. Gallup tends to err closer to fact than most any other poll. Gallup's polling pictures one of the narrower projections amongst the more major pollsters. Many, in fact, have the figure closer to nine.
Here I'm making a projection, still hoping that the ghost of "S" can miracle me into wrongness...we're gonna see something similar to 1948, with a reasonably close popular vote, but an electoral college map so out of balance it may shift the orbit of the planet (hopefully, though, without Strom Thurmond or one of his disciples earning ANY EC votes).
That, on top a rather disturbing article I read in my morning rag citing that Obama and McCain are neck-and-neck in rural areas as well, with a precedent that the Republican candidate generally must garner 15% or more of the rural vote to offset that of the urban AND the fact that ONE SINGLE PROTESTER showed up (conspicuously, I add, since I was nearby but had to remain covert as part of my infiltration), and he supported Ralph Nader!!! Whew, that's a mouthful of ugh.
Yet there are some small golden glimmers out there, and time will tell if they are for the fool: one, that the rural vote seems to be so tight and yet the EC is still far from decided; two, a point that another Gallup poll tries to show is that, proportionally, the number of first timers is staying the same. That bodes well for the youth vote! But then I come back to the "fond" memories I have from four years past.
To tell you the truth, I have found my memory skewed. What I remember:
Kerry good, Bush bad. Kerry up big, Bush falls like nuclear warhead. Bush makes signs of comeback, Kerry up too big to overcome. Bush wins popular AND electoral vote, Kerry actually concedes within two months.I then do just a modicum of research into the recent past and find:
September 6: Bush up 7; September 17: Bush up 8; September 28: 8 again; October 4: tied; October 12: Kerry up 1; November 1: pick 'em.So, by and large, Bush actually lead most of the time, contrary to what my stupid brain was telling me (FIE ON YOU!), although it did show Kerry with the narrowest of leads about this same time last year, terminating in a technical tie. Of course, America doesn't believe in soccer and she doesn't believe in ties; although the narrowness of the polling was reflected, Bush prevailed by 3,012,171.
It seems like a mathematical equation. Then again, there was quite a bit of wishy-washy in the polling that year, too, so maybe, just maybe, there is some hope. But in the end "closeness" and "Bush" were nearly always consistent, and this year "leading" and "Obama" are nearly always consistent (as well as most normally occurring within the same sentence). So it's mathematical after all.
And that, friends, pretty much dashed my hope of seeing Nevada donning the only pretty red dress she has (see picture).
In related but other news, here's a headline, which, of course, I can't find again, from foxnews.com: 1 Percent of French Prefer McCain. OK, so if that doesn't prove how we should vote, I don't know what would.
Besides, we mustn't base our decisions upon the expressed wishes of people "over there." I would call it something akin to a rancher, requiring a "new" vehicle to help in the feeding of cattle, and settling upon a Prius because his buddy in the "big city" drives one and tells him that it saved him $1,028 in gas last year: it's simply does not fulfill the needs of the rancher, who will, in all probability, destroy the car in the 400 yards between the garage (aka: "car-hold") and the haystack.
Good weekend to all!
0 comments:
Post a Comment