Despite Obama's cautioning the worst of his fan base not to get too "cocky" in the final stretch, Democrats have started prognosticating that a McCain surge in the last days of the campaign is a statistical impossibility.  Typically bombastic Charles Blow of the New York Times (whose graphs are pretty, but not always strictly accurate) has already declared, for example: "It's over." He's studied the polls and the electoral map for months, he says, and no longer believes that John McCain can win.

The Times' Frank Rich sees "only three discernible, if highly unlikely, paths to a McCain victory":

A theoretically mammoth wave of racism, incessantly anticipated by the press, could materialize in voting booths on Nov. 4. Or newly registered young and black voters could fail to show up. Or McCain could at long last make good on his most persistent promise: follow Osama bin Laden to the gates of hell and, once there, strangle him with his own bare hands on “Hannity & Colmes.”

But politics, like sports, is steeped in superstition, and I think it's not only bad form to celebrate your victory before the clock runs out, but bad juju, too.  Politics is the art of the impossible.  Once you stop believing in the unbelievable, and thinking the unthinkable, game's over, might as well go on home.  You don't have to look far to find high profile examples of sure things that misfired at the last minute.  I mean, have we forgotten New Hampshire?  Have we forgotten Superbowl XLII?  35 seconds that changed football history forever. 

I would caution Democrats who are already popping open their post-election champagne to take the advice of  Harvey Keitel's Winston Wolf in Pulp Fiction: "Let's not start sucking each other's dicks quite yet, gentlemen."  It's a truth as old as civilization itself: it ain't over till it's over.

There are always premature gloaters, though.  They're the ones wearing the face paint and waving the giant foam fingers, who've poured their very identity into the championship game.  They need it.  Not for any grand ideal or for the betterment of humanity, but because winning feels like nothing else, especially to losers.  They've been edging all season, and now they're not gonna be denied the earth-shaking orgasm they've been building up to.  Ever noticed: personality cults are a lot like pornography?

David Brooks was right (in recent surprisingly highly eloquent cogitations on Candidate Obama):


Fanatics, regardless of what political affiliations superficially separate them, are essentially all the same.  For the rest of us, it's like living with an addict with bipolar disorder who's always going off his meds.  If Democrats who went off the deep end for Obama think they are fundamentally different from their counterparts on the right who went ape-shit for Sarah Palin, they're wrong.  One may be addicted to smack, the other to crack, but an addict's an addict. 

It's a question whether Obama could have risen to the top of the heap so fast without his rabid fan-base, but now that he has, he's been smart enough to distance himself from them, a little like an indie rock band that makes it big abandoning its original base for wider exposure.  Palin? Not so much.  But then she doesn't have the luxury of time, does she?

Whatever's going on with the wiring in the brains of fanatics has nothing to do with team affiliation — that's more or less an accident of geography.  From year to year the Sox might be better or worse than other teams in baseball, but there is nothing about the team that makes it eternally, intrinsically better or worse than any other. Likewise, if those on the Christianist fringe in the American heartland had been born and raised in the heartland of Afghanistan they'd be ululating members of the Islamicist fringe there.  We owe much more to accidents of birth than we'll ever acknowledge, that's for sure.

So, while conventional wisdom has Obama winning in a landslide, let's take a moment to think the unthinkable.  It's always good to have a plan B.  Here are my top ten things to do if McCain wins at the polls in two weeks...

10. Rend your garments and scream, "WHERE'S THE OUTRAGE???"

9. Emigrate to Canada (again, *sigh*).

8. Run out and buy one of these...



It'll be good to stretch yourself out a little in preparation for four, maybe even eight more years of being fucked, big-time.

7. Switch parties.  If enough Democrats switch, we could get a majority in their party!  Change from within!

6. Prepare to spend another four years mocking your leaders.  Never fear — you'll have plenty of help from late night talk show hosts, SNL, and bathroom reading from Slate.  Books like "Palinisms: Accidental Wit and Wisdom from America's 47th Vice President!" 


5. Start growing potatoes, sewing your own overalls, and practicing your "me Lords" and "me ladies."  Surfdom isn't all fun and games, ya know.

4. Wank.

3. Wank some more.  Harder.  Maybe this time the genie'll pop out of the bottle and you'll get that wish.

2. Shop.  that's what we do in a national crisis, after all, right?

1. Secede.  It's high time, people.  We have more than enough contiguous states this time around to do it, and the whole world would be eager to pour aid into our little fledgling nation, which I'm tentatively calling the USB (for U.S. Beta)...


We would have allies on the other side of the continent, too, in US, um, C, or US 2.0, whichever they settle on. 

Honestly.  If we can't resolve our differences, maybe we should just amicably part ways.  We would have the pleasure, then, of rejoining the family of nations, and of watching our enemies across the border slip inexorably into the the middle ages without dragging us along.  In ten years, the former so-called Red States would resemble a pre-industrial penal colony, while we would look more like... well, Canada.

Remember: there's always a silver lining, even if you have to sew it in yourself sometimes.