A DEMOCRATIC "LOCK?" DON'T BELIEVE IT!

In a Barack Obama speech I heard part of the other night, the Democratic candidate sounded a lot as if he were giving his acceptance speech, after the election. In their relentless polls, taken once every hour, it seems, the Obama-loving national news media is predicting a landslide of mammoth proportions. "It's all over," they seem to be saying. "Obama has the presidency all locked up."

Really? Not so fast, Democrats. There's one tiny little thing that you're overlooking here; the election hasn't taken place yet! Yes, the election. You know -- that little "formality" we have every four years, where the people go to the polling stations and actually vote for the candidate of their choice. That election. Remember now? Your candidate actually has to win that election, by amassing enough electoral votes among all the states to put him in the White House for the next four years. That hasn't happened yet, and it's not over until it does. Don't get ahead of yourselves and don't get too cocky and overconfident. That's when you usually lose.

The people of America will decide who our next president will be, on Tuesday, Nov. 5th. The pollsters don't get to decide and the media doesn't get to decide. The people do. That's us -- me and you, and millions more like us, all across this nation. So, in spite of all the overconfident boasting and all the Democrat-favoring polls that the media concocts, it will all come down to that, just like it always does. We will decide this thing for ourselves. ACORN and similar liberal groups can register dead people and 7-year-old children to vote, and they can register all the homeless people, imprisoned felons, and illegal aliens that they want to; that sort of thing goes on in almost every election, but it seldom, if ever, works at all. The fraud gets discovered and eradicated and the honest people's votes are what carries the day for the winner.

And who do I think will win this thing? I'm hoping, of course, that John McCain will come out on top, when it's all over, and things appear to be sliding in his direction now, from what I've seen and heard in the past week. The national polls (the ones you can trust, that is), have tightened up dramatically. The Democrats appear to be in their "frantic campaigning mode," not a good indicator of the "lock" they claim to have. And I heard from reliable sources that the Dems' own internal polls (the ones we never see) indicate that they're losing in most of the battleground states. So things are not what the Democrats and their media allies would have you believe.

And one thing to remember about McCain -- he's as strong a finisher as anyone I've ever seen; he winds things up with a bang. That's his style. He doesn't give up and he never quits; that's the old warrior spirit in him. That's what got him through five years of captivity and torture in the Hanoi Hilton prison. In the primaries, his campaign was given up as practically dead, early on. But he battled relentlessly back and won. The proof of that is the position that he holds right now. Don't ever count John McCain out of it. That would be a serious mistake.

One lesson I learned, back in the days when I used to engage in a little sports betting, was that there's simply no such thing as a "lock." Oh, you might be fooled into thinking that you have one. A strong, powerful, nationally-ranked team plays a little team that nobody knows anything about and it looks like the mismatch of the century; that little nothing team is about to be booted clean out of the stadium. It looked that way in January of 1986, at the Sugar Bowl, when the #2-ranked Miami Hurricanes played a little underdog team from Tennessee --our own Volunteers, who weren't even ranked in the Top 25 nationally. They got to that bowl because it always hosted the Southeastern Conference champion and we'd had a great year in our conference.

Miami's players were all cocky and overconfident, thinking they could just "show up and win" and the sports gurus all thought the same thing. But there was a game they had to get through first. The 'Canes lost miserably to the Volunteers that New Year's evening -- 35-7. We took them apart on the field, then spit them out. It was a thing of beauty, if you were a Vol fan. The Hurricanes went back to Coral Gables totally spent, with their pride destroyed and their heads hung low. The Hurricanes learned, just as I did in my betting days, that on any given day you can play a lousy game and lose your shirt.

There's no such thing as a lock, in politics, as in sports. It'll pay to remember that, the next time you hear the Democrats saying that they have one in this election.