It was mid-October 1992, and Bill Clinton led George HW Bush with 16 points in the polls. In the end, Clinton won the elections by 6 points. In 1999, Al Gore led George W Bush 51 to 40 points in at least one poll. In 1973, Jimmy Carter led Gerald Ford in one poll by 13 points; Carter finally won by just 2.

All this is meant to convey one message: Democrats, don’t you get your hopes up too much just yet.

This race is going to tighten to microscopic margins, and John McCain might yet win.

That’s why Barack Obama’s campaign is pushing people to vote early, and vote now, while Obama is still high up in the polls. This is especially the case in Ohio, where the Democratic state leadership has done everything it can, within the confines of the law, to allow early voting everywhere — especially in districts which in 2000 and 2004 were very close, and which narrowly went for Bush.

And Obama’s campaign just might have learned something from Tom Bradley’s campaign for governor of California, in 1982. The Bradley Effect is named after him — but for the wrong reasons. The Bradley Effect, in my book at least, had everything to do with motivation and early voting, not with racism.

Tom Bradley led his white Republican counterpart in the polls by a wide margin, but in the end lost. Many to this day wrongly say that it was racism that led white people to say to pollsters that they were going to vote for Bradley, while in the end, they voted for the white candidate.

Not so.  Closer examination of the polls leading up to the election in hindsight showed Bradley’s lead narrowing significantly. In the end, Bradley’s lead had evaporated to just 45-44.  He then lost the election because of early voting; Republican voters simply were more motivated than their complacent Democratic counterparts, and they went out to vote early in massive numbers, precisely because Bradley was out-polling their favourite candidate.

This is the Bradley Effect the McCain is now banking on. Team McCain is hoping that the strong polling numbers of Obama will motivate McCain voters to go out to vote early.

Team Obama is trying to do two things at once: dilute the Bradley Effect, and gain the upper hand in the process while he is still leading McCain in the polls.

And that’s smart thinking by people who seem to know their campaigns history. Election Night on November 4 will tell who outsmarted who. This fight could still go either way.

So The New York Times accused senior John McCain campaign aide Rick Davis of being a paid lobbyist for a company, and still being on the payroll on the company’s Freddie Mac account, right up to last month, just before the mortgage lender was nationalised. The Grey Lady, on who the McCain campaign declared war on Tuesday, based its accusation on oral information it got from sources who remained anonymous.

Oral info? Anonymous sources? Three of them Democrats, one Republican…? I’m a reporter myself, by trade. And this is what I call ‘skating on thin ice’.

Today, Team McCain blasts the Grey Lady, and categorically denies the story, and — what’s more — it says it can prove that the newspaper of record is wrong. It also calls out the newspaper, demanding that it show the world its evidence.

Now, the people running The New York Times are not stupid. Or so I should hope. So I’m assuming that the editors feared that this would happen, and that they have documented evidence to back up their accusation, which they will publish within hours. Otherwise, one would think, they would never have published it.

So. Let’s hope, for the Grey Lady’s sake, that the editors weren’t stupid. Because if they botch this, they will have lost all credibility.

John McCain is desparately trying to neutralize the economy as the dominant issue in the presidential election campaign. To that end, he changes tack whenever the winds of opportunity demand it.

Two weeks ago on Monday, he said that the government should not bail out AIG. But Wednesday, after Barack Obama more or less came out in support of the bailout, McCain suddenly supported it.

Last Friday, McCain made several public statements about his plans for the economy — and his ‘plans’ seemed a combination of what Treasury secretary Henry Paulson had been proposing, what Obama said, and what Congress want.

Now, McCain has come out and said what he feels should be changed in Paulson’s plan. And again, McCain’s proposals are a carbon copy of what most Democrats on the Hill have been saying, and what has been emanating from Team Obama for several days.

Of course, Obama came out officially stating what he feels should be changed — which is almost exactly what his co-Democrats on the Hill want, which is logical as Obama is a Democrat too — and now McCain is yappin’ like a little kid that Obama is copying his ideas!

It seems to be policy in the McCain camp.  Whatever the plan or idea, if it clashes with popular opinion, don’t mention it. Stick to whatever’s popular instead, and stick to it like velcro.

During the weekend, Democrats and Obama started objecting to some points in the Paulson, and guess what? McCain started objecting, too. Then on Monday, Democrats wanted the government to impose bonus and pay limits on CEOs of investment banks that are being bailed out.

And almost immediately, there was Mr Deregulator, John McCain, who said that he too is now in favour of pay limits. PAY LIMITS!? John McCain, a Republican, wants to regulate the pay of CEOs of private companies…???

Is John McCain the second coming of Karl Marx? Not even Newt Gingrich can believe what McCain is saying these days.

But of course, the Anybody But Obama crowd can. They’ve never even heard of socio-economic ideology. All they know is what they’ve been told by their parents, and that is that anyone titled ‘Democrat’ is an instrument of the devil himself. And so they’ll vote for McCain.

And so it will be.

Ohio used to be a ‘swing state’. It is still called that by almost every news organisation and polling company and sure enough, polling aggregates everywhere are showing a so-called neck-and-neck race between Barack Obama and John McCain.

Don’t believe the hype. Ohio is a Republican state. And Team Obama knows it. But… *whispers* they don’t want anybody else to know that they know…! SHHH….*

Oh, and forget Florida, too.

Michigian. Minnesota. Wisconsin. Iowa. Colorado. New Mexico. New Hampshire. That’s right, the states that are turning ever more blue these past months is where Obama’s Army is at.

Many a time have I been scolded for assuming publicly that the colour of Barack Obama’s skin would play its part in the upcoming election. Many a times have I been warned that racism in America is on the wane. Many a times have I been scolded for being prejudiced about Americans.

Well, they were right: not all Americans are prejudiced towards black people. Not all, just many.

They failed in their quest to attack one of Barack Obama’s strong suit — his image — and so they’re trying something else: Team McCain is now attacking Obama’s signature issue, his strongest, er, strong suit, which is the economy. It’s the single main issue on which Americans trust Obama more than McCain.

And so Team McCain has once again switched to Bush Mode: identify your opponent’s main strength, attack it, weaken it, then take it and slam him with it.

I don’t believe the guys over at Fivethirtyeight.com, the people who say that they “do polls right”. I also don’t believe the aggregate of the polls at Realclearpolitics.com. Or Pollster.com. I don’t think neither of those companies or websites is correct, due to the Big Black Holes in this particular election.

I have three reasons to doubt polls more than ever.

1. Barack Obama is black. There, I’ve said it. Now, Big Black Hole Numero Uno is: how many people are telling the truth, when they get their evening phone call by a pollster’s volunteer who asks whether they’ll be voting Obama or McCain, and when they’re asked whether race is an issue? I can’t imagine one person who will blurt “Oh I ain’t voting for that guy, he’s black!” The irritating thing is, that nodoby knows whether this is an issue at all. So it’s a black hole in a black hole.

2. Turnout. This is the Holy Grail for Democratic pollsters. (And something more of them are desperately clinging to.) There are scores of strategists within the Obama campaign who believe that voter turnout this year is going to trump all records. And of course, they believe that most of those newly registered voters will turn out to vote for Obama.

I don’t believe it. Yes, Obama-leaning people have been registering in massive numbers, but the Big Question — which none of the polling companies or aggregators can answer — is whether it will be enough to offset the number of McCain-leaners. And, for that matter, no one seems to have measured whether the legion of the Anybody But Obama-crowd, who weren’t motivated to turn out until the rise of Sarah Palin, is now going to turn out to vote after all.

3. Doubt. People are still too much in doubt, that’s maybe the one thing that’s strikingly obvious from the polls (and a safe thing to conclude). People are swinging wildly, like a pendulum that’s out of whack.

And heck, aside from those three things, I’ve never trusted polls as absolutist measurements of popular opinion. I merely view them as harbingers of trends.

I for one do not believe that the unpolled people — those who ordinarily don’t go out to vote, but who the Democrats believe will now turn out in massive numbers — are a different species from those who are being polled.

Take a bunch of unlikely voters, compare their voting trends to those of likely voters, and you’ll see pretty much the same picture.

So therefore, I personally believe that if there’s going to be a higher turnout, that it will be divided among trend lines. And those trends do not look good for Barack Obama.

No matter which way you look at it — from the left, the right, from down below, above or behind — one can only conclude one thing: Obama is losing support, and McCain has made a huge comeback. And that’s still trending. Even the clearly Obama-leaning folks over at Fivethirtyeight.com have toned down their rhetoric; it seems as if they, too have resigned themselves to a fairly strong possibility of McCain winning the elections.

There’s no denying it. McCain’s comeback is HUGE. It also shows just how much a lot of independent voters, who are the ones who seem to literally be running over to McCain, were on the fence, unconvinced and unmotivated, resigned as they were that this year was going to be a Democratic year. Not so! The Republican base is rallied, people have started to believe again.

It means something, it cannot be denied. And against all this, if I look at the way things are trending, all that Obama has done and is doing now, isn’t helping. He’s had a darn good run in the past five days, bashing McCain over the head with everything that has gone wrong economically speaking.

So let’s see what the Harbingers of Trends tell us at the end of the week. Say, next Monday and Tuesday. And I predict the following:

Obama will have been slamming McCain over the head with McCain’s signature weakness, the economy, for 1,5 weeks next week. If Obama hasn’t reversed trends in the Harbingers of Trends (and McCain isn’t caught with an underage boy on a toilet in Utah, or something similar), he will lose this election.

Why? Because it would mean that for all the want of change among the voters, and all their fears about the economy, they simply didn’t care. It would also mean the Great Failure of the Obama strategists, because it would mean that, in the end, the economy was not the electorate’s main concern after all.

Every four years in America, somebody takes out a cattle prod and slams it up the bum of approximately half the population. Those are the ones who go out to vote during presidential elections. Suddenly, they wake up, pull their heads from the sand, and in their naivete expect the political campaigns to inform them about the candidates and their positions.

Like I said, every four years. But this year’s voter vintage seems exceptionally stupid.

Honestly, you can approximately tell half of the voters anything you want, and they’ll believe you. If a politician says that his opponent wants to raise your taxes? Believe him. Don’t check it, don’t go onto the internet, and by all means, don’t read a newspaper. The guy who said it was wearing a suit, right? And he was on TV, right? Well, then it’s gotta be true, Bubba!

Don’t believe it? Think I’m being too harsh on your average American voter? They’re “not stupid!” you scream as you sit there in front of your screen, foaming while your arms flail in utter disgust at the remarks above? Well, read this informative excerpt from the Washington Post:

A Washington Post-ABC News poll taken Sept. 5 to Sept. 7 found that 51 percent of voters think Obama would raise their taxes, even though his plan would actually cut taxes for the overwhelming majority of Americans. Obama has proposed eliminating income taxes on seniors making less than $50,000 a year, but 41 percent of those seniors say their income taxes would go up in an Obama administration.

I don’t know about you, but I was flabbergasted. At least we now know why the Republicans are always doing their best to destroy the education system – they want more of those stupid idiots!

So. As I said. You can make voters believe anything you want. And Team McCain knows it. The Republicans have been winning elections this way for years. Of course, it does mean that you end up with people like George W. Bush at the helm.

I’m beginning to think that the country deserves another 4 years of disaster.

A new Wall Street Journal / NBC poll (opens as Acrobat .pdf document) out today shows that a majority of voters questioned is comfortable with the idea of having Sarah Palin in the White House as vice-president, despite a “national debate” on whether she’s experienced enough for the job.

That’s very interesting. Because polls have for months been showing that voters are somewhat concerned over Barack Obama’s lack of experience. It is the very reason why Team McCain has from the start been highlighting Obama’s perceived “lack of experience”.  Obama selected Joe Biden, a Senator with 33 years of experience in foreign affairs, to be his running mate. That’s a lot of experience, but it hardly made a difference in the polls.

So what can we conclude from this? That experience is something that only troubles Obama? Or is experience simply not that important to voters?

To paraphrase Lord Acton: “ideology blinds, and absolute ideology blinds absolutely.”

That is at the core of the question, when trying to analyze why voters deem Obama’s lack of experience a problem, but are less concerned about Palin’s lack of experience. I think the explanation for that is that people are more inclined to forgive candidates for a lack of experience, if those candidates candidly and forcefully prove that their are vehemently defending the ideas of those voters.

Months ago, I had a conversation with a hard-right American woman on some political discussion forum. When I asked her why she would never vote for Hillary Clinton, she literally said that “politics is not the place for women”. She said that women should be taking care of the family, making sure that the kids are healthy and the house is clean, etcetera.

However, shortly after John McCain selected Sarah Palin to be his veep, I saw a post of the woman on the discussion forum again – and she was thrilled by Palin, and she would go out to register, and vote for her. All the talk about how women should not be in politics was out the window, because Palin is backing the same hard-right, Christian ideology. (Minus the “women should stay at home” stuff, obviously.)

That threw me back to the 2000 election. I had many discussions with American voters then about their presumed choice for the presidency. I was aghast; quite a few of the people who said they’d be voting for Bush, didn’t really like his socio-economic agenda, but said they “had to” vote for Bush as he was the only candidate promoting a conservative Christian agenda. Some of these people had voted for Clinton in ’92 and ’96, but were finally turned off by the Lewinsky scandal.

They all acknowledged that Clinton’s economic policies had worked, and worked fabulously, and they acknowledged that Al Gore would probably continue those succesful policies. But it didn’t matter.

During the 2000 election campaign, experience was also an important factor. Al Gore had been vice-president for 8 years, and had served in the Senate for many years before that. Bush, despite having been governor of Texas, was completely inexperienced in foreign affairs. He proved it by a number of gaffes during interviews and debates. But it didn’t matter.

Bill Clinton, while on the stump for Gore, famously pressed the voters to “choose wisely”. Nonetheless, for those Americans, ideology trumped wisdom. They all voted Bush in the end.

At the end of 2003, I talked to some of the same people again. The disaster that was Bush’s economic and fiscal “policy” was clear, and these guys weren’t stupid. But I wasn’t surprised at all when they said that they would still be voting for Bush. They all believed that Kerry would be just as tough as Bush as commander in chief, so that wasn’t the problem. No, their problem with Kerry was that he wasn’t promoting a Christian-conservative agenda. And perhaps Bush could finally install a new conservative Supreme Justice in the Supreme Court during his second term. They were finally turned off when Bush botched that with his Harriet Miers nomination.

To Christian fundamentalist wingnuts like them, people like Sarah Palin can do no wrong. If today documents showed up which clearly show that Palin illegally deducted millions in tax expenes, if today someone reports that Palin once drowned a kitten, or if Palin today says that as president, she’d sell Alaska to Canada, they would still support her.

As for independent, not necessarily very religious women who are flocking to Palin: as some polls have shown, many are voting for her because she’s a woman. A fairly large number of women now view Palin as the torch bearer of the feminist struggle for equality. Some have, without blinking, switched from the quite liberal Hillary Clinton to the ultra-conservative Sarah Palin. I’m charging here, but that’s a bit like a cow preferring a butcher over a PETA volunteer to have as her new friend.

That aside, it’s quite ironic for them to vote for someone because of her gender. These women seem to be making the same mistake as the misogynists they’re fighting. Misogynists will not vote for a woman because she’s a woman. Feminists, who joined the struggle to fight for acceptance of equality between men and women, now say that they are voting for Palin because she’s a woman. Misogyny in reverse.

I wonder how these women sleep at night. Oh wait, I know – “ideology blinds, but absolute ideology blinds absolutely.” And that while darkness helps people get to sleep! Of course, how could I forget…

Time for Team Obama to turn the lights on McCain, while also asking Palin what exactly she thinks of the economic policies of George W. Bush. Does she support his policies, like McCain does? And how does she feel about the fact that McCain doesn’t agree with her view on abortion, which holds that abortion should never be allowed – even not in the case of incest or rape? Isn’t that a problem?

If the game of Team McCain is to paint Obama as “just another tax-and-spend liberal”, i.e. your average Democratic candidate and nothing special, then it is time for Team Obama to paint Palin for what she is: an ultra-conservative, right-wing Republican. And you do that not by accusing or pointing fingers, but by continuously asking questions via the media.

The answer is to question her.

‘John McCain. Change we can fear.’

(Seen on an ABC News message board.)

Hilarious.