Can he still do it? The polls are tightening but RCP.com still has Obama crushing McCain. But where does RCP get that number? They get it by averaging in polls from political porn mags like Time and Newsweek that show Obama is more popular in the US than Kim Jong Il was in the last popularity poll taken by the Pyongyang Intellegencer. The guys who tried to use fake memos to torpedo Bush in the last election and still haven't acknowledged that they might have made a mistake are running a poll that shows a wide Obama lead. Oh really?

What advocacy group ever took a poll and came out with an answer that showed that their position was unpopular? According to the Sierra Club's poll we are all dying to abandon our cars and take up subsistence agriculture with the help of our animal friends. The Heritage Foundation finds an American population gazing fondly at the Constitution and yearning for a constructionist judiciary. The Tuna Foundation finds that tuna is the most popular fish. The New York Times finds that America is lusting to vote for Obama. Can we believe any of them?

We cant even believe the ones that show a very tight race, the one's that have consistently shown this to be a very tight race with a swing to McCain when Palin appeared on the scene and a swing to Obama when the market crisis erupted. But the numbers in these polls have always returned to an inside-the-margin-of-error squeaker. What does that show? It shows a large group of very soft supporters who are truly conflicted about where they are going to end up.

The frightening economy is a big plus for Obama. The line coming from the Obama camp that this chaos is a result of Bush's tax policies might be a total lie but it is unrefuted by the feeble McLame and it hits home. Who could look at that wizened piece of gristle Ted Stevens skulking away from his seven felony convictions and not have anything but contempt for a party too stupid to demand that this fossil not run for re-election when he was under indictment and on his way to his 84th birthday party? People just aren't going to vote for someone as repulsive as Stevens. When 'The Torch' Toricelli was in a similar situation in New Jersey, a state where future convicted felons make up a huge proportion of the state government and even a larger percentage of the electorate, Bill Clinton appeared to make sure 'The Torch' did the right thing and dropped off the ballot. He was replaced by a vacuous, grinning half-wit named Lautenburg (pronounced Lousy-burg). Yes Lousy-burg wears adult diapers and drools at his desk in the Senate but one of his attendants makes sure that he is a reliable vote for Harry Reid and the boys. The Republicans haven't lost their brand they've lost their way. So its asking a lot for anybody to vote voluntarily for this pack of inferior schlubs. The average air conditioning repair man knows a weak-kneed, greedy, valueless incompetent when he sees one.

Meanwhile, across the aisle here is this shiny new candidate and this party behind him that are attempting to hide their inner Stalinism behind a facade of center-left populism. They ran a convention where all the usual loudmouths were silenced and an attempt was made to appear concerned about the lives of their taxpaying helots. Those clever Democrats are confident that the Great Unwashed will continue to not notice that states whose governments are controlled by Democrats have the highest unemployment, the highest taxes and the biggest deficits. States where sales and property taxes rise as policemen and firemen are cut from the rolls as crowds of felons are handed voter registration cards and released early from prison because protecting public safety has become too expensive. The Democrats are confident that their ability to pretend to be honest moderates instead of the corrupt, glassy-eyed, Stalinist social engineers that they really are will get them through another round of elections with vast majorities in the legislature and Barak Hussein Obama happily ensconced to lead the social revolution from the White House.

But that pesky internet has changed everything. Thats where most people get their information these days. They get e-mails from their friends that direct them to clips on U-tube. U-tube has changed everything. You can see any event without any commentary from your betters in the media. Clips like Obama's little talk about redistribution on NPR get millions of hits. So did his argument with Joe The Plumber. What a message to Blue Collar America that was! We're going to take your wealth and spread it around, buddy. These blue collar types know that after the trillions of dollars that supposedly have been spent to cure poverty the poor people don't look any more prosperous than they did a generation ago and they recognize 'spreading the wealth around' as the euphemism for highway robbery that it is. Meanwhile people are U-tubing the Wright sermons and all of Barak's various statements about sharing the wealth. They're seeing Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid doing a victory dance on the corpse of the Bush Tax Cuts and thinking about just how high taxes can get...

If polls like Zogby and Gallup go into this weekend showing the gap that they show now then McCain will win the election. If Obama hasn't closed the deal by now then what the polls are showing is the very normal reticence that any normal human would feel when faced with the necessity of voting for a sawed-off, stuttering, incoherent, Wrinkly Old White Dude like McCain. I freely admit that I have the same feelings myself. Where I part ways with many people is that I'm not going to let my healthy contempt for our cross-eyed ole Maverick cause me to vote to put a slicked-up version of Leon Trotsky in the White House. I think a lot of people are going to have the same problem and they are going to end up, like me, having to face the ugly prospect of living the rest of their lives knowing that they voted to put John McCain in the White House.