Maybe the horrendous mix of economic, war and budget crises certain to confront the next president won't be quite so inevitable. That's the warm thought from Thomas L. Friedman, the New York Times columnist who majors in foreign affairs and minors in everything else:

"Have you seen the reports that Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is suffering from exhaustion? It’s probably because he is not sleeping at night. I know why. Watching oil prices fall from $147 a barrel to $57 is not like counting sheep. It’s the kind of thing that gives an Iranian autocrat bad dreams.

After all, it was the collapse of global oil prices in the early 1990s that brought down the Soviet Union. And Iran today is looking very Soviet to me."

A collapsing Iran would solve a huge foreign policy problem in one fell swoop, and even if the mullahs remain in charge of some sort of fundamentalist state, an Obama presidency would pose propaganda problems:

"Barack Hussein Obama would present another challenge for Iran’s mullahs. Their whole rationale for being is that they are resisting a hegemonic American power that wants to keep everyone down. Suddenly, next week, Iranians may look up and see that the country their leaders call “The Great Satan” has just elected “a guy whose middle name is the central figure in Shiite Islam — Hussein — and whose last name — Obama — when transliterated into Farsi, means ‘He is with us,’ ” said Sadjadpour."

But is Friedman just another LEM (liberal elite media) type getting ahead of the vote?

Maybe. The accuracy of polling rests not just on the questions asked but the presumptions behind the calculations of the pollster, the Washington Post points out:

"Some in the McCain camp also argue that the polls showing the largest leads for Obama mistakenly assume that turnout among young voters and African Americans will be disproportionately high. The campaign is banking on a good turnout among GOP partisans, whom McCain officials say they are working hard to attract to the polls... 

 'I have been wondering for weeks' whether the polls are accurately gauging the state of the race, said Steven Schier, a political scientist at Carleton College in Minnesota. Borrowing from lingo popularized by former defense secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, Schier asked what are the 'unknown unknowns' about polling this year: For instance, is the sizable cohort of people who don't respond to pollsters more Republican-leaning this year, perhaps because they don't want to admit to a pollster that they are not supporting the 'voguish' Obama?

If so, that could mean the polls are routinely understating McCain's support. 'I have no evidence that this is happening,' Schier said, but he added: 'I'm still thinking there's a 25 percent chance that this is a squeaker race and McCain pulls it out.' 

If he does pull  it out, maybe McCain's next gambit may be to have Palin open negotiations with Terhan. Think of the photo op!
 

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