One thing that annoys me about the punditry today is that there never seems to be any penalty for being wrong. If a doctor consistently misdiagnosed patients, he or she would soon be working as a Walmart greeter. But in today's political intelligentsia, you can make prediction after prediction that proves incorrect and no one even notices. Certainly no one loses their job for being wrong as is proven by the continued employment of Dick Morris and William Kristol.
Recently, a class at Hamilton College in New York analyzed the predictions of 26 political prognosticators between September 2007 and December 2008. What they found was that a lot of them were wrong an awful lot of the time. They found fifteen predictions by Cal Thomas, for instance and judged one correct, 13 wrong and one "hedged." You wouldn't let your lawn be mowed by a guy with that kind of track record. They didn't study Kristol or Morris, who I expect would have done worse. The pundit with the best record in their survey was Paul Krugman.
This link will take you to a 59-page PDF file of their findings. I was hoping they'd itemize all the predictions and show how they scored them but only a few are cited. If you see where they have put all this data up for inspection, please let me know.