Which is not to say that McCain can’t come back (although, honestly, I kind of don’t think that McCain can come back). But there are two leftist indulgences that we should resist:

(1) The across-the-board “no one knows anything” anti-intellectualism that is better suited for coffee shop hippies than it is for someone genuinely interested in politics.

(2) The “there’s a vast conspiracy arrayed against us that reaches all the way down to individual pollsters – and we can discover it by tracing to whom Rasmussen’s cousin’s best friend is married” conspiracism that the DU is so fond of.

omriceren on October 17, 2008 at 2:59 PM

I get your points but you are forgetting that the PUMAs are giving pollsters false information and you are also underestimating how unwilling people are to seem racist (or un-hip) by saying they are voting for McCain. Because of the tremendous raging viciousness of Obama’s supporters, polls are much less reliable this year than even 4 years ago. No one thought Kerry was the Second Coming.

It is not “anti-intellectual” to know that it is not helpful to the rank-and-file voters or campaign volunteers to closely track polls (leave that to the campaign professionals); nor is it kidding oneself to acknowledge that there is a tremendous pro-Obama bias in the media, as well as across many sectors of the “intelligentsia,” academia, and “professional” groups.

(Face it, our country is bleeding money on a questionable bailout, but Obama is still salting his speeches with talk of “investing” in education. As a former science professor, I know what that means and I know the audience to whom it is directed. The last time I checked, pollsters (statisticians, social scientists) sprang from the same NSF-funded academic teat as the liberal faculty and students who form Obama’s core group. I would be shocked to find a poll indicating that they are any less politically liberal than university academicians.)

There is a convergence of disparate groups in our country — from loyal Hillary supporters who were kept from fully participating their own convention to middle-class mind-your-own-business-and-I’ll-mind-mine voters who aspire to the same success that Joe the Plumber seeks — that will produce the votes McCain & Palin need to defeat Obama (& that other guy – ha ha).

Don’t let your pessimism convince you that these peoples’ gut reactions against Obama are something they are not. You don’t have to be anti-intellectual to recognize that Obama is pandering to voters now so that he can convert this country to European socialism later. And you don’t have to be a “truther” to distrust the pollsters and the media who reports on the polls.

You should go to Hillbuzz and read the Eeyore post at the top of the page, particularly the comments. One poster there described her experiences with polls from the 1980 Reagan campaign.

Y-not on October 17, 2008 at 3:24 PM