Long Way to Election Day

Today is Opening Day of the Major League Baseball season. Do you realize that we have an entire 162-game regular season ahead of us, which takes six months to play and ends the first week of October, followed by two rounds of playoffs and then the World Series — all before the presidential election?

That tells us all how much time is left in this already-marathon campaign. And that means that many, many twists and turns, ups and downs and surprises are ahead of us. For example, it is a rule of politics that however things may look today, they will look differently in six months.

So, for everyone who today looks at a McCain-Obama match-up in November and thinks, “McCain is going to win,” a word of caution: What looks one way today may not look that way in six months.

As another example, let us go back six months to Oct. 1, 2007. Who ever would have thought that John McCain would be the GOP nominee and that Obama would be ahead of Hillary? Back then McCain was mired in single digits in all polls and was broke and was thus considered to be dead as a door nail politically.

And Obamania hadn’t caught on yet. Who would have thought that the vile, hate-filled Rev. Wright videotapes would not surface until we were already three months into the primaries? Why didn’t the Hillary campaign get these and air them a year ago and snuff out Obama before he got up a head of steam?

So, with seven months to go before we choose our next president, it is safe to say the landscape will indeed look a lot different than it does today. John McCain, who has had a cakewalk since Iowa thanks to a compliant mainstream media, is certain to run into real trouble. At some point circumstances will turn against McCain. And his pals in the media may also turn on him if only because they are sensitive to charges that they gave him a free pass.

Obama, too, has had it easy so far. The media has tried everything they can to protect him and to coddle him. The Wright videotapes Fiasco has shown a left-leaning media do all they can to try to minimize these vile, disgusting, racist diatribes. Something else will occur that will discombobulate Obama. It has to.

Hillary is the Energizer Bunny. She keeps on going. But at some point things will come to a head, and no one knows the outcome.

A big surprise is certain to happen between now and November. Some huge event lies in wait with the possibility to change the course of the election. This could be a financial/market collapse, a surprise military or terrorist attack, a scandal, a health-of-a-candidate incident.

The point of all of this is to remind us all that what lies ahead is indeed a mystery to us all. But history teaches us that things rarely remain static. So if you want to bet, bet that by Election Day things will look totally unlike the situation today.