I'm with Ryan Avent on this. There's some idea out there that the left is, or is supposed to be, panicking about Obama. But I can hardly rouse myself to check the daily polls. It's not that I'm sanguine about Obama's chances: He may have the edge, but I always figured McCain to be criminally underestimated. He's one of the most popular, skilled politicians in the country, and he's running against a first term black guy. When it's this easy to see how a loss would look inevitable in retrospect, I refuse to count it out in predictions. That said, over the past two months absolutely nothing of import has happened. No fundamental dynamics have changed. Obama's cash advantage didn't dissolve, the economy didn't undergo a rapid improvement, and the electorate didn't radically alter its apparent composition. We're seeing a lot of potshots and a lot of ads, but this early out, it's all meaningless. The events with the ability to impact the outcome begin coming now: VP picks, convention bumps, debates, massive ad wars, ground games, and the constant X factor of events (been awhile since we saw a bin Laden tape, for instance). And their potential to actually change the race magnifies as we near the actual election. Let's be clear: McCain may well win this thing. But he'll win it after September, not before. Sadly, in these slow months, we all become 24-hour news networks by choice, and in order to justify our obsessive attention to the horserace, we have to pretend the daily perturbations are meaningful. At least when MSNBC pretends this or that early-August press release matters, they're making a profit off the charade.
