All hail to the New Year, wherein there will be an election, and would you like to know its outcome?
You would? Good. Then read on and you will be enlightened. Not just yet, though. We wouldn`t want to spoil the suspense.
First, let it be understood that this is no seat-of-the-pants humbuggery here. No, sir, or ma`am as the case may be, there is no star-gazing involved, no consulting of entrails or astrological charts or other uncleanlinesses engaged in by the riffraff.
Au contraire, as we used to say in Brooklyn, this is science. What you are about to read is a foretelling of the results based on the same historical, demographical, economical, political, historical-demographical and political-economical wisdom which is used by the learned men (and a few women) who go on network television programs to make predictions about the elections. So why haven`t they told you what the outcome will be? Well, for either one of two reasons, or perhaps both. The first is that they lack the courage to follow their own inexorable logic to its inevitable conclusion (you see how you start to write when you emulate television commentators?). The second is that if they told you the outcome now there would be no point in the networks inviting them back 47 times before November, perhaps forcing them to take some drastic action such as going to work for a living.
This same impulse, by the way (here we have a digression), is what compels all those boys on TV to warn you that their predictions are sure to come true ”barring unforeseen circumstances.” Pretty cute. To ”unforesee,” according to the big dictionary here, means ”to fail to foresee,” so all the guy is saying is ”this will happen unless something happens which I can`t think of right now.” True.
None of those copouts here. This is the hard-core scientific stuff, so here goes:
The Democrats cannot win. Why? Because of the well-known ”GOP electoral college lock,” that`s why. Granted, this may not be so well-known to you if you are by chance a normal person who goes around living your life, doing your job and minding your own business. But the ”GOP electoral college lock”
(sometimes alternately worded ”the GOP lock on the electoral college”) is one of the most important of all political cliches, based as it is on history and demography both, and one of the duties here, a public service as it were, is to keep you folks informed about the latest political cliches. A dirty, rotten job, but performed cheerfully.
What it means is that barring some cataclysmic event-war, recession, humongous scandal-the Republicans are so certain of winning so many states that there is no way the Democratic candidate can be elected. There is no war. There is no recession and will be none until 1989. There was a humongous scandal, but it`s over and its political damage has been done.
There is one other way to break that ”GOP electoral college lock,” and that is for the Democrats to nominate a wildly popular celebrity who is beloved by all and disliked by no one. Unfortunately for the Democrats, Walter Payton declined to run, leaving the Democrats to choose among several fellows named Gephardt.
The key question, then, is whom will the Republicans nominate? Simple. Recent history makes it abundantly clear that the Republicans, the more establishment-oriented of the two parties, always nominate their early front- runner. They have done so every four years since 1960 and there is no reason to doubt that they will do it again.
This means that Vice President George Bush will be the Republican nominee. Now things get a bit complicated, so listen carefully. We have reached a point where the governing party, presidential division (the Democrats have most of the other divisions), has nominated as its presidential candidate the sitting vice president of the United States. But if there is one thing history teaches us it is this: The sitting vice president never gets elected president.
Not since 1836, anyway, which is so long ago it doesn`t count.
So what is the upshot? Unable to choose among several fellows named Gephardt, the Democrats will conduct 63 ballots at their convention before deciding that they really don`t want to be president, anyhow, and will adjourn without nominating anyone. Bush will run unopposed. He will lose.
Let`s see the boys on TV top that one.
