This once looked presumptuous... now it's looking like a pretty sure bet.

Despite how close the presidential race has been (yes, past tense, you’ll see why in a moment), for months I’ve been predicting a Obama victory, quite often with the words “I don’t see how the guy can lose.” I know, I know… Racism still exists, sure, and plenty of people still buy the notion that Republicans are the only people who can manage the military. But it’s just seemed, to me, a stretch that Americans by and large are going to vote for a man who’s so old and so utterly Washington (despite his somewhat plausible increasingly hollow claims to the contrary) when they have a chance to vote for another whose image, at least, is diametrically opposite of the lowest-approval-ratings-since-the-Nixon-era President Bush. Intellectual instead of bumbling? Check. Digests information instead of relying on an empty gut? Check. Fresh-faced and full of vigor instead of grey-haired and increasingly harried? Check.

So far, however, I’ve been mostly in the wilderness on this. So imagine my surprise to find that Daniel Larison over at The American Conservative — a man who’s voting Baldwin, no less, and has very little nice to say about Obama — has predicted the same today.

Now that it is becoming increasingly clear that McCain is going to lose in a blowout (and here I must acknowledge that I never imagined this would happen and assumed the electorate would remain evenly divided), what will be the aftermath within the GOP?

(His answer, by the way, is worth reading in full.)

Doom and gloom, say you McCainiacs reading this? I’m sorry to have to tell you this… well, I’ll just let today’s electoral count from Politico tell the tale:

(See also The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder, “ObamaPollSplosion: He Breaks 50 Everywhere”)

Tags: Barack Obama, Daniel Larison, Electoral College, John McCain, landslide, Marc Ambinder, Politico

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 1st, 2008 at 3.23 pm and is filed under politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.