Leave out the media’s need to stretch out excitement (and therefore viewer engagement) to the maximum point of endurance. Leave out their ratings-driven need to keep the presidential contest as much of “a game” as they can for as long as they can. For example, if one Super Bowl team is 58 points ahead in the second quarter, there are an awful lot of people who won’t see all those half-time commercials. Can’t have that. Leave out their breathless “this-just-in” use of the latest polls to keep us going ooh! and aah! Like I said, leave all that out.
I think we should look at a different set of tea leaves, recognizing that they all are, in fact, tea leaves. Take these statements as qualified in just the ways they ought to be qualified.
That said, as Dylan (not Thomas) once said, you don’t need to be a weatherman to tell which way the wind is blowing. As somebody else once said, “It’s the economy, stupid.” Unemployment is over 9% and likely to stay that way. It could go up. We are teetering on the brink of a second recession. Investors and venture capitalists are hiding in caves. Obama has governed in a hard left kind of way, but unsuccessfully and ineptly enough that a hard left primary challenge is fairly likely. Economic tough patches can be forgiven by the electorate, but they need to be the size of your thumb and in the rear view mirror to be so forgiven. They can’t be going on even as the people are voting.
And so it is, it seems to me, that regardless of who the Republican is, Obama is hosed. As Kinky Friedman put it, he would vote for Charlie Sheen over Obama at this point. And if you’ve lost Kinky . . .