I now have a bet going with a friend of mine. If Obama wins in November, my friend Mark has to buy me a venti mocha at Starbucks. Otherwise, I have to buy him one.
At this point in time, however, it looks like Obama has more to fear from some of his friends doing him damage, given how berserk they have gone about Palin.† So I am a little concerned about losing my bet. But we still have two months left to go in this presidential election (sigh). In that time, after the initial charm has worn off, and people begin to tire of seeing Palin's face, there's still the chance that Obama might pull it off. But he needs to boogie hard.
As far as Palin is concerned, well, all I can say is that I am not that much impressed with her. Sure, she was once in a beauty contest, now is the governor of a sparsely populated state, shoots guns, can hunt caribou or moose, loves her family, and might be a conservative xtian, still I can only say "so what?" By themselves these things don't qualify a person to hold a high national office. And this doesn't take into account that she's probably being used for window dressing and mere culture-war bait, and that in a McCain presidency she will have about as much importance as Dan Quayle had in the Bush 41 administration. It's McCain that's running for president and not Palin.
In the meantime, while everybody was distracted by the Palin brouhaha, the government just took over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Other than making the taxpayers the chumps who will now have to cover F&F's bad loans, what's up with that? It's scary that neither candidate is talking very much about this. Let's hope that China stays happy with holding onto dollars.
It will be interesting to watch what happens when Palin gets interviewed by the media, once the McCain campaign allows that to happen. This morning even Chris Wallace, on Fox News, was starting to wonder why they are keeping her incommunicado as far as interviews are concerned. I daresay that the MSM will question her about her religious beliefs, and if their questioning comes off smacking overmuch of hostility, it will work in McCain's favor. However, if they focus on her views regarding the economy and foreign policy, it will have the effect of working in Obama's favor, for in that case I am fairly sure that she won't have anything to say beyond just repeating by rote the standard GOP platitudes.
† The Left's proclivity to indulge in nutty paranoia about xtians is a big element in the craziness that broke out. Of course I am not saying that everybody is like this, but some wheels got very squeeky this week. And then there were the goofy antics of a certain influential and widely-respected blogger on the website of a well known magazine. Nonetheless, we all remember him for coining the very perspicacious socio-political term "christianist," for which we are all thankful, and whereby we can understand those things that would otherwise be murky or mystifying.