Top One Reason Why McCain Might Win

Ay-yay-yay. This one doesn't hold up as well with hindsight, but it was a sincere guest-post at HH.com at the time, on October 31st.

I would argue, however, that as a matter of hypertext markup language elegance, finding an occasion to use a single-element ordered list, and then converting that opportunity into reality, was no small aesthetic victory. (But not a large one either.)

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[Copied here for archival purposes on November 5, 2008, from the post linked above at HughHewitt.com.]

(Guest Post by Bill Dyer a/k/a Beldar)

J-Pod has 10 Reasons Why McCain Might Win, and it's a nice list, worth a glance at least.

With due respect to him, however, I have a better list. It has precisely one item on it:

1. We haven't had the election yet. So anyone who tells you — based on public opinion polls or science or guesswork or magic or anything else — that he or she knows what the outcome is going to be is lying to you.

Throughout this weekend and all day on Monday, there will be zillions of words communicated — spoken, read, printed, downloaded, whatever — about the result of the upcoming election. Every one of them is nothing better than a guess. We've seen in past elections that notwithstanding the best modern polling techniques, all sorts of polls — including "exit polls" on the very day of the election — have been badly off.

I am not one of those who argues every four years that "This year's election is the most important ever!" I don't know whether that will turn out to be true or not. I am confident, however, that there has never been an election remotely like this one. And you know that too, if you'll just take a snapshot poll of your own common sense.

Treat your own vote as if it might decide the election. Encourage your friends to do that too. Take responsibility. And don't let someone else — anyone else, and especially not some smug know-it-all newspaper or TV reporter, or three-quarter-in-the-bag pollster — persuade you to waste or squander the most precious aspect of your heritage as an American.

— Beldar