It looks like the margin between Obama and McCain is about five points. That’s a lot closer than a lot of pollsters had it. In fact, I see only two polls that had it as a five point race yesterday, Diageo/Hotline and Battleground. Check RealClearPolitics for the final polling.

If McCain had won, I was going to decry the way that the media uses false poll information to influence public opinion. Since Obama won, it is a moot point. It probably sounds like sour grapes to say that several polls that had him 9 to 11 points ahead (and they have the audacity to claim they have a 3 point margin of error).

It’s impossible to know how much the polls influence people’s decisions, but the fact that McCain was within five percent is much different than the scenario the media painted

The Catch-22 of this election is that even if McCain had won, he’d have an impossible economic situation. He’d have to cut spending and taxes and then the Dem majority in congress would be crying bloody murder for two years. Also, having a moderate Republican just postpones true reform. If you look at mid-term elections usually the president’s party suffers loss of seats. If McCain was president 2010 would have given the Democrats a super-majority in the Senate and more seats in the House. So much for a conservative Supreme Court with 60 plus seat Senate for the Democrats.

Barack Obama’s Catch 22 is that he has promised to balance the budget, cut taxes on 95 percent of wage earners, introduce universal healthcare and a trillion dollar package of social programs. Most would agree that this is a tall order. If he fails, will it be possible to blame the Republicans?

If the Democrats go too far to the left and the economy continues to scuffle along, we’ll likely see something similar to to 1994 and the Gingrich revolution against Clinton. I don’t think the USA will become a left wing country so quickly. But we will see.

There were going to be positives and negatives about either outcome for the Republicans, so I am not depressed today. The failure of Bush’s big government spending policies opens a door for a mini-revolution within the Republican party in the next two years. Candidates who never would have had a chance can now emerge.

I was never a big McCain fan. He actually impressed me as I got to hear him more. I thought he would have been better on spending than Bush who I did not vote for (I voted for Howard Phillips and Mike Peroutka three times) and of course I was excited about Sarah Palin. I was thinking down the road what could happen with her if something happened to McCain.

It’s amazing that Palin is so similar to me — about the same age, baptized as a Catholic, converted to Christ in an Assemblies of God Church, now a member fo an independent evangelical church and with a Christian spolitical philosophy and worldview. I’ve never heard a candidate speak so clearly about what matters. It’s amazing that someone like this would have been picked.

If McCain would have won, I had an article ready, “The Swiftboating of Sarah Palin.” The idea from the Republicans and goes back to Lee Atwater’s strategy against Mike Dukakis.

Since Dukakis was a fiscal conservative, they attacked him as “a card carrying member of the ACLU and a tax and spend liberal.” It wasn’t true, but it worked.

Then John Kerry was a war hero and also somewhat fiscally conservative, so they destroyed him with the Swiftboat ads trying to show that he was a traitor — not true, but many were willing to believe it.

The Democrats caught on to this because they saw that Sarah Palin was a bright, fresh, articulate rising star who was energizing the Republican base with her ability to speak directly to people like me. The media cynics were able to somehow portray her as inarticulate, dumb and anything else they could concoct. If McCain won though there was a real danger that she would have quickly become a Dan Quayle with the left waging a propaganda war to prove to the world that she is a stupid bimbo. Now at least she has a chance to show what she can do in Alaska with energy and fiscal responsibility.The irony is that if she remained the Governor of Alaska, the media would have continued to refer to her as “America’s most popular and successful new governor.”

As a vice presidential candidate Palin’s negatives rose, but she remained hugely popular with the conservative base. I was at one rally with 70,000 people in The Villages, Florida. That’s unheard of for a VP candidate. It will be interesting to see where she will go from here.