The Fat Lady Ain't Singing

October 25, 2008
The Fat Lady Ain't Singing

I’m starting to run into a sense of defeatism - or at least tangible pessimism - by the pro-McCain/Palin camp. It runs from hard-core solid McCain supporting bloggers (eg: TexasFred's comment beneath the linked story) to the few pro-McCain journalists that run in the mainstream media (eg: Krauthhammer talking of all the conservative "ship-jumpers" who want to be on the winning side.) Only a few days from the elections and polls are showing Obama having a nearly double digit lead. In fact, some polls are showing Obama has a double digit lead.

McCain supporters are beginning to lose hope and Obama backers are already breaking out the champagne.

This article should help the McCain folks regain some of that hope and should convince the Obama folks not to pop any corks yet.

I certainly wouldn’t want to wager my retirement income [oh wait, that disappeared in the financial meltdown and is already gone ... never mind] on McCain and Palin pulling this off. But I don't think the McCain/Palin supporters should be ready to throw in the towel yet. I’m listening really closely and the fat lady isn’t singing yet.

To some extent it is realistic to believe that McCain never really had a chance because he was playing in a rigged game with marked cards. Or, as Newt Gingrich and I separately said on the same day purely coincidentally [at least I doubt he’s getting his guidance from my blog and I hadn’t seen his comment when I first wrote mine] ... "the fix is in".

Well, the fix has been in from the beginning. There is no way that Obama on his own could have made it to the point of being a presidential contender. He is way too young, fresh, unknown and inexperienced. No ... he didn’t get there on the merits. He was chosen. Ultimately "by whom" is a fascinating question. Who is the real puppeteer? Who pulls the strings? Who are we really electing when (if!) we swear Obama in as President? I don’t know. But he was selected and then handed to the Chicago machine and used as a charming, naive front man. I think Obama probably believes he got where he is on his own merits ("woke up on third and thought he must have hit a triple"). But he’s just a pretty face with the ability to read a teleprompter speech well.

I know I’m beginning to sound like Hilary and her "vast right-wing conspiracy". But whoever is running the Chicago machine (or perhaps is even the puppet master of the Chicago machine as well), has the national pressography in lock-step compliance. Virtually the entire mainstream media (with some possible exceptions ... or perhaps only a few "apparent" exceptions so that it doesn’t look any more obvious than it does) is acting as campaign workers for Obama. "Someone" even managed to "get to" Powell and convince him to turn on his very good and close friend of decades. After much thought ... I cannot believe that Powell truly believes what he said, (although it is true that he has clearly shown extremely bad judgment before). He does not appear to be an easy man to intimidate and I’ve always believed he was too honorable to be bribed. So I don’t know how they did it. But I believe "someone" must have.

In a rigged game ... did McCain ever stand a chance?

Oddly, the answer is yes. And oddly I believe that is largely due to something that is widely perceived as a dangerous character flaw in McCain: he is a gambler. Literally, as in spending time playing the craps tables in Vegas; and figuratively in that he is willing to roll the dice on decisions that drive the RNC and his own staff up the wall (his selection of Governor Palin as running mate is an excellent example). McCain has been playing in rigged games all his life and knows how to beat the house even when the cards are stacked against him.

He had (by all appearances) zero chance prior to his Palin selection. The question was just how badly he was going to be beat. Obama was the anointed one. To suggest that Obama's ego got a little carried away with itself is putting it much too mildly :-) He was so certain that he was selected by "higher powers" to this role he gained a Messiah complex. He is right that he was selected by higher powers. But they are very earthly powers. They deal in back rooms and hide, perhaps in plain view. But whoever they really are, these the Powers that Be ("PTB") possess enormous power and influence.

Vegas wouldn’t have even run a line on McCain at that point. He was "just another Bush"; an ultimate Washington insider who had voted with the President way too often for his own electoral good. Essentially anyone that was on the bandied about list of his "likely choices" would have assured the defeat that looked like a forgone conclusion.

So he did what all experienced gamblers do when they see the cards are marked: he brought out a new deck and shuffled. He chose someone the Obama camp and the PTB had not anticipated nor planned on how to respond. And he caused absolute and total panic among all the Obama supporters, the media, the left-wing blogs ... and Obama himself (who allegedly took up smoking again very shortly after hearing the news).

After the initial panic, the entire "vast left-wing conspiracy" [:-)] went to work bringing their considerable resources to attempt to destroy the public image of Palin and to use her as an example of McCain’s poor judgment. As one who actually knows a fair bit about our Governor (and did long before she was selected - see various posts below), it is mind-boggling to me the lengths to which the media has gone to attempt to discredit her as a credible candidate. She is nothing like the caricature the media has painted of her. No negative rumor, no matter how bizarre and unsubstantiated, is too loony for the punditocracy to print about her. If there is absolutely no substantiation, the press can (and does) go with their standard fall-back position by pointing out that there isn’t much to substantiate the rumor. It is a journalistic trick as old as the profession of muckraking.

"The widely reported story that, yet again, Sarah Palin was found passed out from booze and pills in a hotel bathroom has not been sufficiently documented that we are able to attest to its veracity."

I haven’t actually seen that headline yet, but it wouldn’t surprise me if I did.

And it has had an enormous effect. The PTB are back in apparent control, Obama is warning against overconfidence, which is excellent evidence that he is overconfident!

But the fat lady ain’t singing yet.

John McCain has been dead and buried, only to rise again, so many times that Lazarus is jealous. Based on that alone I wouldn’t count him out. But there are other reasons not to believe the fight is over or that McCain can’t pull it off.

The first is that a lot of polling is done with the express purpose of attempting to show whoever the pollsters (or whoever hires them) wants to win is doing so. This is because there is a widely held belief (which I don’t know is accurate, but don’t dispute), that, in general, Americans (or perhaps anyone) are sheep that want to be on the winning side and so if the poll shows that Obama has a comfortable lead and the lead is widening ... people will be more inclined to vote for him. I’ve never truly understood that psychology (but as I say, I don’t dispute that it is real), but that may simply be because I’m inherently a contrarian who tends to float upstream and swim against the tide.

Poll results are all manipulated to "adjust" the raw data for such things as the pollster’s belief in the likelihood of whether certain identified groups of respondents are likely to vote, or to make the sample mirror the actual population in things such as gender, party affiliation, race, age, etc. Beyond that, the exact wording of the question is critical and minor changes in what is asked and how it is asked can bring dramatic changes to the final results. Ultimately this means that a poll can be heavily manipulated to produce desired results.

So I take all national polls with a grain of salt. I don’t know what McCain’s own pollsters are discovering. But he isn’t looking discouraged enough for me to believe that they agree with Pew or McClatchy.

There is another, very powerful, reason to not give up hope. People lie.

It is PC now to be an Obama backer and very un-PC to think highly of Palin or to suggest that you might actually vote for the McCain ticket. And, sheep that we are, people don’t want to appear un-PC. So they lie. They lie to their friends, they lie to their co-workers, they lie to reporters ... and they even lie to telephone pollsters (because no one is ever really sure that their responses will be kept confidential).

This is particularly true in this race for several reasons, one of the main ones being that Obama is black. There is a sense that if you oppose Obama, you must be a racist and in this day and age that is the last thing that anyone would want to be accused of. So they tell everyone that, of course, they are going to vote for Obama. But in the privacy of the voting booth, many of those people will pull the lever for McCain.

And then they’ll lie to the pollsters on their way out of the voting place.

This same thing happened four years ago. I predicted then that, even though Kerry was comfortably ahead in the polls, that once inside the booth, a lot of people who said they were Kerry supporters would vote for Bush and would lie about it afterwards. I said that if I was correct, the exit polls would be way off and that the actual vote would be much higher for Bush than the exit polls show.

I was dead on.

When I re-tooled this blog a couple months ago, I brought along some of my old postings. Many of the links didn’t survive the transfer or the linked site is gone now, but they are still sufficient to show, not to put too fine a point on it, that I was absolutely, unarguably, "I told you so" right! :-).

I don’t know whether this phenomenon will be sufficient to put McCain in the winner’s circle. I’m not ready to call the election on his behalf yet. But I do believe that it will have a very real effect and that, once again, the Republican ticket is going to do significantly better at the actual ballot box than they do in the polls.

So it isn’t time for McCain's supporters to give up. That alone can become a self-fulfilling prophecy; whether because of the sheep phenomena by which people want to be on the winning side to just not bothering to vote since it is a "lost cause" anyway. Between McCain’s gambler instincts and his Lazarus imitations ... and my belief that people lie to pollsters, I’m not at all convinced that Obama has this one in the bag yet. And there still could be an "October surprise" which may make a major difference in the election (whether in McCain or Obama’s favor, I have no idea).

But the election isn’t over until it’s over. The fat lady isn’t going to sing until the 4th of next month. No matter what the pollsters and the media tell you.