I've stopped looking at the various electoral projections. They're down now to moving states back and forth as one contender pulls one point ahead of the other…in a poll with a three-point margin of error that missed predicting the winner in 2000 by five points. They all have different rules of how to weigh the surveys ("We take the three most recent of likely voters and divide by the four most recent of registered voters unless conducted on a Thursday, assuming it's not raining…") and it seems to me these formulas are groping for a precision that cannot possibly be there. In any case, the fact that ten different electoral maps yield ten different scores should tip us off that at least nine are wrong.
I don't know who's going to win — or what good it does now to pretend your guy has a lock on it. I know who I want to have win…and especially who I want to have lose. In a way, I have the feeling that we're all going to lose. We're about to elect a president who about half the country will fervently believe is a very bad man who doesn't deserve the office and probably didn't win honestly. And once that guy's installed, the opposition party will be having meetings, scheming how to cripple his presidency and perhaps gin up some investigations that could lead to impeachment. Just what we need when we're at war and the economy's hanging on by its fingernails.
As happens too often, I don't have a high opinion of any of the folks whose names I'll see on my ballot on Tuesday, at least under the "President" category…and I'm suspicious of those who claim they really and truly like their choice. I think the Bush supporters are kidding themselves to claim they have a man of character, or even one that has a clue how to deal with our current problems. Hell, Bush hasn't even convinced me he knows there are problems. But John Kerry has also failed to inspire great confidence. One of the best arguments for him turns out to be that he couldn't do much worse, and that a fresh start — clearing out folks like Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and Rice — is what is needed at the minimum. I think Kerry's a smart man with better intentions than we've seen in and around the White House lately. But with the wafer-thin mandate he's likely to have if he wins — to say nothing of a probably-Republican Congress — I can't say that I'd be optimistic he could make a lot of difference.
I can't help but think that if the Democrats lose, the common wisdom will be that they didn't fight dirty enough. If Republicans were running against a President Gore with this track record, they'd be screaming that the deficit alone — never mind Iraq or National Security — proved the incumbent was close to destroying America as we know it. Kerry, because of his initial vote to authorize funds for the Iraq war, has been hampered in declaring it a disaster and the waste of human and financial resources that it's turning out to be. In hindsight, I think Howard Dean would have been a stronger candidate, if only because he could be as hard on the economic points as Kerry and harder on Iraq. This is not to say I'll be surprised if Kerry wins; just that it shouldn't be as close as it now seems to be.
The worst thing about Friday's Osama tape, apart from showing that he seems to be alive and well, may be that it muddies the post-election analysis. You can make a strong argument that the reappearance of our real enemy helps Kerry: It reminds America that Bush failed to catch the mastermind of 9/11 and that it was not Saddam Hussein, as some Bush voters seem to believe. You can also argue that it helps Bush because much of America wants a John Wayne nuke-the-enemy approach to roaches like Bin Laden, and they still think Bush is Mr. Tough Guy. No matter who wins next Tuesday (or whenever someone wins), we're going to hear that ol' Osama tipped the election in that guy's direction. But no one can ever really know. We may not even know who got the most votes.