It Ain't Over Till It's Over

I have an uneasy feeling this morning. I went to bed last night with the Tampa Bay Rays up 5-0 in the sixth inning. I woke up to find out that the Red Sox had come back (from a 7-0 deficit, no less!) to win the game. I'm rooting for the Rays, so this was a downer, but it also reinforces the Yogism that it's never over until it's over, and that goes double for politics.

Barack Obama has had a decent lead in the polls for a few weeks now, and has only further solidified that lead by winning all three debates against his opponent, John McCain ("winning" being judged by the variety of polls taken, not by the spinning pundits). Looking at the electoral map, it's hard to figure out how McCain could win: If Obama wins every Kerry state, plus Iowa and New Mexico, in which he is leading, he needs only one of the "battleground" states to win, and he is leading or tied in all of them (particularly Virginia, where he has shown a ten-point lead in some polls).

So why do I have a sense of unease? The Red Sox have come back from 3-1 deficits in their last two league championship series. Even more than the Yankees, they are proving very difficult to kill. Terry Francona, as manager, has now won seven straight games in which the Red Sox faced elimination. They seem to me to be like the Republican Party, which has a remarkable bag of tricks, and is not above chicanery and thievery to win elections. Whether it's a "wag the dog" national security incident, challenged voters at polls (or mysterious voting machine malfunctions), or continuing to try to cast Obama as a shady "other" who is some kind of Manchurian candidate, the G.O.P. are Rasputin-like in their ability to stay alive. Sure, Bill Clinton beat them twice, but he also won both elections without gaining fifty-percent of the vote, thanks to Ross Perot.

The other huge unknown in this campaign is race. The Bradley effect gets lot of play (that's what happened to California gubernatorial candidate Tom Bradley, an African-American who led the polls by ten points in 1982 but ultimately lost). The theory is that some people tell pollsters they will vote for a black candidate, but are overruled by their innate prejudices when it comes time to check the name inside the voting booth. Whether the Bradley effect ever existed, let alone if it exists now, is highly debatable, but the very fact that it floats in the media miasma is an indication that because Obama is the first African-American candidate for president, none of us can know what race will do to the numbers.

I'm going to be spending the next two and a half weeks in a steady clench, sweating this thing out. I think I'll feel a lot better if the Rays win a game this weekend and put the Red Sox away.