I'm Already Wrong

... and it's only March. It seems like no more than a few months ago that I was asserting, with steadfast certainty, that the Election of 2008 would be Rudy vs. Hillary, and that Hillary would win. Well, at the time this seemed a perfectly reasonable prediction. Rudy was "America's mayor". He had star quality. He had rescued NYC from the basket case it had become under David Dinkins, who seemed determined to recreate the set from "Blade Runner". And of course, he was primed to ride the Twin Towers to victory. But he made at least one grave mistake, and that was in counting on Florida, the home of the butterfly shrimp and ballot (sounds like the name of a British pub), where the voters are, indeed, not as smart as fifth-graders. Setting aside the fact that Florida is basically a mission church of New York, did he really think that was all it would take to put him on the fast track? But hey, he's a "New Yawkeh", and as we know, New York is the "cradle of presidents". Oh no, wait, that's Virginia. I guess New York is the high school of presidents -- you know, the kind of high school with metal detectors and armed security guards. At any rate, mighty was his fall, and one wonders -- has "9-11" really lost so much traction in so little time? Or was it just something about Rudy?

At the same time I was making that prediction, it was obvious to one and all that McCain's campaign was dead, and that Obama was a "dead man walking", just waiting for the fatal blow from the Clinton side. Well, that fatal blow hasn't struck as yet, and time's a-wastin'. And as for the other candidates -- feh! Thompson looks like one of those Russian dudes who used to stand on Lenin's Tomb to watch the May Day parade. And Kucinich looks like he was run over by a rotary mower as a small child and never recovered. (But both those guys have wives who are _babes_. How the heck does that happen?)

Plus Hillary -- oh, where to begin! She makes Big Nurse (in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest") look like Carol Channing. (I read one of the greatest descriptions of Hillary ever a few years back. It was a quote from a woman who had grown up in Communist China. She described Hillary as having a "class warfare face". Perfect, just perfect.) But in any case, I was at least half right -- so far. And the Clinton campaign has brought out its big guns, the largest caliber of which is, of course, Bill Clinton, attack dog extraordinaire. He can eat a rottweiler for breakfast with a side order of pit bulls. But of course, he's very hard to contain -- scratch that, he's _impossible_ to contain. And his out-of-left-field statements have started to backfire. Plus, he doesn't have as much clout with the black community as one would expect, given that he was "the first black president". So it's gonna be a long, hot summer -- and an expensive one for the Democrats, while the Republicans keep cool with McCain. Despite the notion that the economy is overtaking the war as "the" campaign issue, I can't help but believe that the Iraq situation at the time of the election is going to have a lot to do with the outcome. The question is, which way would it go? Let's say the insurgents pull a "Tet Offensive" sometime in October. Does that advantage McCain by calling attention to a war that we "must win"? Or does it disadvantage him by providing evidence that it's a lost cause? Time will tell.