2 More Days

Things look good for Kerry... and then they don't look as good... and then they look good again... and then they don't... Every blog I go on (pro-Kerry) sounds extremely optimistic, while Bush blogs sound frankly downbeat and as though they were preparing for the worst. All of the polls show a stastical dead heat, and with Bush not breaking 50%, as everyone likes to point out, as an incumbent that is all very bad news. Zogby shows Kerry ahead in Florida. Let's pretend we live in a world where the vote can't be gamed and I too am feeling very confident that Kerry is going to win this. But then there's the real world, the one we live in, where the vote can, and is gamed, and... it's one of those things that zen master Rumsfeld describes as either one of the things that you know you don't know, or one of the things that you don't know that you don't know...

But there is that anxiety, palpable amongst Bush followers, and as I was reading one article about this in the Washington Post, I came upon a very curious quote that makes me realize all the more how important it is that Kerry is elected - because there are honestly those among the Bush flock who have somehow elevated him to some kind of religious iconic status, a sort of latter day Christ holding back the final days:

But Young is not blinkered; she reads the newspapers, knows how hair-thin a margin Bush has in Ohio. Only this week she began to consider the impossible, that Bush could be right and still lose -- and put that together with her conviction that God knows what He's doing.

"If that happens, the Lord must want Kerry to be in there," she says. "If that happens, it must be the Lord is telling us we're living in the Last Days, and we'd better prepare."