Last Minute Worrying

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It might be a little too early to get complacent, but at least one source suggests that a Romney victory in 2012 can happen only if Democrats are too lazy to vote, which they notoriously are.

A site called Norwig.com has an FAQ that will be dangerously comforting to most Democrats, but ideally no one will be comforted to the point where they decide to actually skip voting.  It appears that, if we go on the odds placed by betting parlors or websites, that Obama is tipped to win at a probability of about 67%.  I don't understand the details, but go look at it.

So don't get nervous, but don't relax and go into a deep slumber that lasts past Tuesday.  Unless there is a decisive Democrat majority, sufficiently large as to make Congress think twice about enacting legislation that will be seen as repugnant to the majority, congress will be a place where everything comes to a standstill, or goes horribly wrong.  (From our point of view.)  Recall the dog-days of the Clinton presidency, when congress felt confident enough to create a circus of threats of impeachment and so forth.  (Despite all that, Clinton left the country in excellent shape, and the Republicans had to get out an unbelievable propaganda machine to portray the state of the nation as being negative.  They succeeded, mainly because of a large number of scandals, some of them fabricated by the GOP.)

At any rate, if I haven't told you already, we have an Obama Fellow rooming with us the past couple of months, a wonderful young woman from New York.  Obama fellows are unpaid, full-time volunteers who will continue working for the campaign until just past the election.  One day I happened to see her at the dining table (long after we had finished supper) looking into the sort of fine analysis that goes on in political think-tanks: what will the strategy be, post-election, if Obama wins, and yakkity yakkity yak.  (Political junkies who watch MSNBC probably do this kind of thing all the time.  Look at Norwig for a taste of this.  All pseudo-science and numbers that would make better sense to a bookie.)

Though I think "our" Obama fellow is a wonderful fellow indeed, I must say that the Science of Political Science has been a scar on the landscape.  It has succeeded in divorcing political activity from practical life, and moved it into the area adjacent to Marketing and Advertising.  It is the Madison Avenue-ization of politics, which has now emerged from out of smoky little basement offices and into the Penthouse Suites of Washington Beltway.  It is a shame.

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