The polls are unequivocal: Barack Obama has held such a convincing lead (currently nine points according to CNN; 11 points according to Newsweek; between six and 11 points according to Real Clear Politics) for such a sustained period of time that only three things can now prevent Barack Obama becoming the 44th President of the United States on 4 November.  (According to Real Clear Politics, Obama already has more than the required 270 Electoral College votes in the bag from those states in which he is at least six points ahead in the latest polls.)

The first thing is so unlikely as to render it essentially irrelevant: hubris.  While I have seen little evidence in recent weeks and months of the Obama alleged to be so inspirational, nor I have seen any indication that he’s going to get in front of a crowd or microphone between now and ballot day and self-implode by performing a primal scream of triumphalism.  He’s frankly far too self-posessed to Do A Kinnock.

The remaining – and far scarier – possibilities are the Unknown Unknown and the Bradley Effect.

The Unknown Unknown – where would we be without Donald Rumsfeld…? – is traditionally called the October Surprise in US politics, a news event that radically alters the political dynamic in the days before an early November election.

While the concept seems more talked about than a genuine phenomenon in American plebiscites of late, the train bombings in Madrid on 11 March 2004 are widely believed to have affected the result of the general election vote taken three days later.  There is still plenty of time for something groundbreaking to occur until about 7pm Eastern Time on polling day.

The Bradley Effect, meanwhile, is the apparent propensity for opinion polls to overestimate significantly the support for a black candidate opposing a white candidate, named after former LA Mayor Tom Bradley who lost the 1982 Californian gubernatorial election despite all polling evidence predicting his victory and almost repeated seven years later in the election for governor of Virginia.

Less than a week before the 1989 election for Virginia governor, two newspaper polls showed L. Douglas Wilder, a black Democrat, comfortably ahead of his GOP opponent by between 9 and 11 points. But when the ballots were counted, it was a nail-biter that Wilder won by fewer than 7,000 votes.

Political scientists dubbed it “the Wilder effect,” or referred to it by its earlier name, “the Bradley effect,” after Tom Bradley, the black mayor of Los Angeles who lost the 1982 California governor’s contest despite being up in the polls by as much as 22 points in the weeks before Election Day.

“The Wilder effect, the Bradley effect, is on the minds of everybody, without exception,” Neil Newhouse, who directs NBC News/Wall Street Journal polling, said, referring to what pollsters say is the phenomenon of some white people lying to pollsters about their support for black candidates.

The experiences of Bradley and Wilder loom ominously over Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, although opinion about the evidence of racially skewed polling in the election is mixed, political analysts said, and it was not seen in the Democratic primaries.

The good news is that most political analysts seem convinced that Obama’s poll lead is real and that, while some undecided voters will undoubtedly opt for McCain and some will undoubtedly do so due to innate racism, this election has effectively transcended race:

We are witnessing something remarkable here: Obama’s race is receding as he becomes more familiar. His steadiness has trumped his skin color; he is being judged on the content of his character.

It would be wrong to hang out the bunting just yet but we might just be about to witness something special.

It’s a sign of the Republicans’ desperation that a magazine cover photograph of Tina FeySarah Palin has caused some of them to explode with rage.

Here’s the offending “slap in the face” from the cover of Newsweek.

Apparently, by not airbrushing and retouching the photograph, the magazine is guilty of sexism.

If you can stomach five minutes of Fox News, it’ll make you laugh.

My personal opinion is that by jumping up and down and screaming about the photograph, they’re hoping to deflect attention from the substantive piece it illustrates.  Political historian Jon Meacham’s piece The Palin Problem is a brilliant forensic dissection of the woman’s execeptional mediocrity.

Palin is on the ticket because she connects with everyday Americans. It is not shocking to learn that politics played a big role in the making of a presidential team (ticket-balancing to attract different constituencies has been with us at least since Andrew Jackson ran with John C. Calhoun, a man he later said he would like to kill). But that honest explanation of the rationale for her candidacy—not her preparedness for office, but her personality and nascent maverickism in Alaska—raises an important question, not only about this election but about democratic leadership. Do we want leaders who are everyday folks, or do we want leaders who understand everyday folks? Therein lies an enormous difference, one that could decide the presidential election and, if McCain and Palin were to win, shape the governance of the nation.

This is entirely the point.  Palin is the one who has chosen to run on the, “Aww, shucks – I’m just a hockey mom,” platform.  Good for her.  But the overwhelming majority of hockey moms know jackshit about foreign policy and shouldn’t get within 1,000 miles of a national electoral campaign.

Put another way – by Tim Robbins on The Daily Show last week:

I want a SMART person to run this country, please.  You know how we have the Navy Seals and they’re an elite squad?  Don’t you want elite people running the government?  Don’t you want someone who is a little bit more qualified than, er, [winks]?

Meacham again:

Palin sometimes seems an odd combination of Chauncey Gardiner from “Being There” and Marge from “Fargo”…  Is this an elitist point of view? Perhaps, though it seems only reasonable and patriotic to hold candidates for high office to high standards. Elitism in this sense is not about educational or class credentials, not about where you went to school or whether you use “summer” as a verb. It is, rather, about the pursuit of excellence no matter where you started out in life. Jackson, Lincoln, Truman, Eisenhower, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan and Clinton were born to ordinary families, but they spent their lives doing extraordinary things, demonstrating an interest in, and a curiosity about, the world around them. This is much less evident in Palin’s case.

Fucking brilliant.

John McCain is a man of accomplishment and curiosity, of wide and deep reading, travel and experience. He is smart without being a snob. He has authored legislation and books. He is a man of parts—the kind of figure whom one could effortlessly imagine being president. Are there many politically attuned people in America now who can honestly say the same thing of Sarah Palin? That they can effortlessly envision President Palin in the Oval Office, ready on day one to manage a market meltdown or a terror attack? Whether one agrees or disagrees with his politics, there is no arguing that McCain is qualified to be president of the United States. But there is plenty of argument about Palin’s qualifications. Why should we apply a different standard to the vice president who would stand to succeed him?

It’s a rhetorical question, of course, but – just for the avoidance of the doubt – the answer is: we should not.

We have had terrific presidents and vice presidents from humble backgrounds, and we have had terrible presidents and vice presidents from privileged ones. The unease with Palin is not class-based. It is empirically based. She is a rising political star, a young woman—she is only 44—who has done extraordinary things. It takes guts to offer oneself for election, and to serve. It is far easier to throw spitballs from the stands than it is to seek and hold office. She is a governor, and she has the courage to go into the arena. For that she should be honored and respected. If she were seeking a Senate seat, or being nominated for a cabinet post—secretary of energy, say, or interior—the conversation about her would be totally different.

But she is not seeking a Senate seat, nor is she being nominated for a cabinet post, and so it is only prudent to ask whether she is in fact someone who should be president of the United States in the event of disaster. She may be ready in a year or two, but disaster does not coordinate its calendar with ours. Would we muddle through if Palin were to become president? Yes, we would, but it is worth asking whether we should have to…

Barack Obama is not the Messiah, and Biden is no Simon Peter, but it stretches credulity to say that Obama is no more qualified to be president than Palin is. Though you may prefer McCain-Palin to Obama-Biden, there is not the same threshold question about the Democrats that is now being asked about Palin.

Sitting with her for part of the Couric interview, McCain implicitly compared Palin to Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan, saying that they, too, had been caricatured and dismissed by mainstream voices. The linkages are untenable. For all of his manifold sins, Clinton was a longtime governor, and George H.W. Bush’s attacks on his qualifications failed for a reason: people may not have respected Clinton’s character, but they did not doubt the quality of his mind. A successful two-term governor of California, Reagan had spent decades immersed in politics (of both the left and the right) before running for president. He did like to call himself a citizen-politician, and Lord knows he had an occasionally ambiguous relationship with facts, but he was a serious man who had spent a great deal of time thinking about the central issues of the age. To put it kindly, Palin, however promising a governor she is, has not done similar work.

I could be wrong. Perhaps Sarah Palin will somehow emerge from the hurly-burly of history as a transformative figure who was underestimated in her time by journalists who could not see, or refused to acknowledge, her virtues. But do I think I am right in saying that Palin’s populist view of high office—hey, Vice President Six-Pack, what should we do about Pakistan?—is dangerous? You betcha.

Superb from start to finish (even if I had to look up who Cincinnatus was), it’s by a country mile the best piece I’ve yet read on this election and I urge you to devote ten minutes to it.

Let’s end with a small chuckle: