The afternoon prior to the first Obama-Romney debate I found myself at adjacent gas pumps with a neighborhood friend. He offered his opinion that the election was over and Romney had no chance — not once but several times. I could not disagree with him. At that point the polls showed President Obama ahead in all but one battleground state as well with a consistent three to four point lead in the national polls.
At one level I understood that my pal was verbalizing his fears as a means of bracing himself for expected bad news and setting himself up for a pleasant surprise if the bad news does not materialize. I suppose I do something of the same in my own frequent writing about the Iranian nuclear threat.
Nevertheless I found his vociferous insistence on the inevitability of President Obama’s re-election a bit irritating and not because I suspected that he was eager for a second Obama term. After all there were still three presidential debates to come and Romney had enough money in hand to blanket the media with ads in the final weeks something John McCain did not have in 2008. And then there was the historical precedent of 1980 when another incumbent with a poor record Jimmy Carter was still up in most polls at the same stage in the election and ended up being trounced by Ronald Reagan.
Just a few weeks earlier I had experienced similar irritation when a friend offered a negative interpretation of the fact that a mutual acquaintance of ours had not yet been released from the hospital where he had gone for tests. Why not just pray for the hoped-for outcome and wait to see what happens? I thought to myself. Why offer pessimistic predictions about events over which you have no control and in which the outcome will be known soon enough?
Create a free account to keep reading.
