It's Over

Call John McCain the mangy underdog, if you like, or cautiously call Barack Obama's lead an embarrassment of electoral riches, but here's what I call this kind of race: over.

The commentariat's "narrative" has now entered a third stage, equal in immutability only to its first. After months of unambiguous predictions of a razor-thin election, then subsequent and similarly unambiguous pronouncements of -- hello, what's this? -- a landslide, the conventional wisdom now has it that things are looking mighty bad for McCain, which is to say mighty good for Obama, but for heaven's sake we can't count one out or the other in.

McCain retains many a triumphant path, they admonish.

Right, such as winning some of those states he's losing. Brilliant.

The, uh, problem for McCain, however, is that there's blood everywhere. He's been cornered not merely into isolated and conceivably defensible positions, but blasted across the electoral board. He's currently pouring everything into Pennsylvania, in the hope that will compensate for scattered and minor losses elsewhere. Yet while he does that, he slips in the blood everywhere else.

That's what happens when you start losing nationally by 10+ points. Together your target areas begin to look amazingly like a map of the United States. For McCain, in reality it's no longer a state-by-state contest. He needs national pull to lift himself everywhere that's key. But he hasn't the resources, and, what's more, he hasn't a salable, transcendent message.

It's over.

Because for Obama, it is indeed still a comfortable matter of traditional battleground states. He can, that is, (literally) afford to focus. His reliable electoral count was sizable to begin with; all he needed from there was a handful of significant pick-ups. And what he's accomplished in that arena appears irreversible.

No, let me back up a bit. It doesn't appear irreversible. It is irreversible, at least in terms of topping 270.

If you missed it, check this out from Dan Balz, last night:

In the [Washington Post-ABC News] latest four-night track, Obama holds a commanding 22-point advantage in states John F. Kerry won in 2004, and he is about tied with John McCain in states Bush won last time (49 percent Obama, 48 percent McCain). Similarly, Obama is up 60 to 36 percent in states Kerry won by more than five and trails by a smaller 52 to 45 percent margin in states Bush carried that easily. In those crucial states decided by five or fewer points in 2004, Obama is up 21 points.

"Breathtaking" has become an overused adjective to describe the astounding, but I swear, my breath was borderline taken when I read that. For Obama to lag behind McCain by only seven points in the hidebound red states is nothing short of revolutionary.

But let us look, as Balz did, at the battlegrounders, whose numbers he called "startling":

There were eight polls of Midwestern states produced by the Big Ten Battleground Poll group. Obama not only leads in all eight states by hefty margins but has improved his standing since the last time the group surveyed these states….

Obama leads by 12 points in Ohio, by 11 points in Pennsylvania and by 13 points in Wisconsin. In Michigan, where McCain's campaign has pulled out, the lead is 22 points. In Indiana, a strong red state, the Obama lead is 10 points.

Or you can take a look at Quinnipiac's latest: "Obama's lead in Pennsylvania is 13 points. In Ohio, which is a must-win for McCain, the lead is a whopping 14 points. The one bright spot for McCain, if you can call it that, is Florida, where Obama's lead is just 5 points."

Remember when "just 5 points" was journalistically conveyed as a shocking upset in motion?

I was a trifle harsh on the vast commentariat in my opening, but I do wish to give political forecaster Charlie Cook some credit. Tuesday he came much closer to writing what is almost literally the bloody obvious by now: "The metrics of this election argue strongly that this campaign is over, it's only the memory of many an election that seemed over but wasn't that is keeping us from closing the book mentally on this one."

Charlie, you marched more gallantly into the minefields of predictive absolutism than most, but you might not want to include everyone in "us."

It is over.

Could I be wrong? Of course I could be wrong. Even in the more absolute, verifiable world of physics a physicist will tell you that there is in fact no absolute guarantee that the speed of light tomorrow will be 299,792,458 meters per second, as it is today.

So let me put it this way: The odds of Obama winning this thing are roughly the same as tomorrow's speed of light being remarkably similar to what we're familiar with. There. There's the technical wiggle room, if one must.

If one mustn't, however, then one can simply say that this thing is over.