In an earlier post I argued that McCain was too far behind to catch up just by normal campaign methods.  But that leaves the question "What could still go wrong?"  I think there are several possibilities:

The economy gets a little better.  Well, gas prices are way down, gas is more available in the southeast, and people seem to be a bit less panicked about the financial sector, although still scared about the overall economy.  Maybe this could chip a point or two off Obama's lead.

Foreign affairs crisis or big success.  As reader bluesplashy has pointed out, Obama is now seen as cool and calm, McCain as erratic, so a crisis probably wouldn't help him much, unless Obama made a gaffe, which is unlikely.  Obama is the most gaffe-free politician I've seen in quite a while.  Capture of Bin Laden? I don't think Bush cares about McCain that much, and the timing would seem really suspicious.  Again, maybe a point or two off Obama's lead, I doubt more than that.

Return of the Bradley Effect.  This is a little scarier.  Nate Silver at fivethirtyeight.com seems confident that this doesn't exist anymore, but I'm not so sure.  I read the article he bases this conclusion on, and the sample sizes are very small.  I wanted to see whether things were different in presidential election years, because the electorate is much larger, and probably more voters susceptible to a Bradley Effect would be voting in those years, as opposed to off-years.  Unfortunately, the raw data wasn't available, so I couldn't tell.  Based on the study's conclusion, a ten-point Bradley Effect, as was seen by Bradley, Wilder, and Dinkins, can probably be ruled out.  But I think a smaller Bradley Effect is still possible.  It's liable to be offset by a reverse-Bradley Effect in states with lots of African-Americans, but I'd say a three-to-four point effect in other states can't be ruled out.  I hope I'm wrong.

Something in Obama's closet tumbles out.  Seems extremely unlikely.  He's been smart about divulging his boyhood drug use, there isn't even a whiff of sexual impropriety, and I'm sure his finances have been minutely examined by all his enemies.  Really, really doubtful.

The Big Lie.  This is the one that scares me.  Republicans have been really despicable the last few election cycles, and if they're desperate enough, they might resort to this.  What they could do is just drop a totally fabricated story into the right-wing media right before the election, when there isn't enough time for the MSM to investigate it and rebut it.  That could give McCain a few points.  Of course the McCain campaign would not appear to be responsible.

The conclusion, I guess, is that none of these possibilities is enough by itself to change the likely outcome, but a combination of them could do it.  I hope Obama is preparing for the last one.   

One of the least remarked but possibly most significant developments of the 2008 campaign is that Barack Obama has found a way to make Republican smear campaigning counterproductive.  Other Democrats should take note.  Obama's strategy has been:

1.   Let them attack.

2.   Call them liars.

3.   Wait for the media to agree.

4.   Then attack them the same way.

The strategic point here is that this makes lying counterproductive for the one who goes first.  When Obama follows this strategy he can neutralize the gains made by the Republican smears by using ones of his own.  This equalizes the effects of the smears themselves.  But since Obama goes second, the McCain campaign suffers from the stigma of having been called liars by the media, and Obama's response is then seen as retaliation, which is not as bad.  So they both damage each other equally with the attacks, but McCain damages his own reputation more by going first.  Overall, Obama wins.

The key here has been Obama's willingness to hit below the belt, but only after McCain has done so and been called out on it.  After McCain's below-the-belt claim that Obama wanted to teach kindergartners about sex, Obama waited for the McCain-as-liar narrative to develop in the media, then he unleashed an equally below-the-belt attack implying that McCain was anti-immigrant, when McCain was actually pretty reasonable on that issue.  When Obama did this, his Hispanic support went up, and polls in New Mexico, Colorado, and Nevada in particular improved dramatically.  The McCain camp complained bitterly about that, but everyone had already decided that he was the liar, so no one listened to him.  That's the beauty of it.  Obama got a free pass because McCain's complaint's were discounted since he had been labeled as the liar.  However, Obama did back off when the media started to call him on it, and he timed it all well enough that the McCain-as-liar narrative remained intact. 

Of course, Obama was also smart enough to not even bother using this strategy after the economic crisis hit.  When your opponent takes out a gun and shoots himself in the foot, there's no need to fire back.  Going negative on your opponent when the country's falling apart and everyone's looking to you for leadership just isn't smart.  So Obama let McCain do it and McCain took the hit.

Some may question Obama's ethics for being willing to use smears in retaliation.  I sure don't.  If you want to have a fair fight, you can't allow cheating to go unpunished.  Kerry did that with the Swift Boat fiasco, and the result was that Republicans got rewarded for cheating, because their smears damaged Kerry and went unpunished.  Since they were getting rewarded for doing it, they kept doing it, and it worked.  Obama, on the other hand, realizes that if you make cheating counterproductive, people will stop doing it. 

I hope other Democrats adopt this strategy, because one of the most enjoyable aspects of this campaign has been watching the apoplectic rage of the McCain campaign at having this tactic turned against them.  They just can't believe what has happened to them, at how incredibly unfair it is that they're getting called out on their lies while Obama seems to get away with his.  They're being forced to run on substance and they just can't stand it, and don't know how to do it.  Also, another fun thing to watch has been McCain's responding to this by getting very indignant and declaring war on the media.  Now that's a really smart move in a presidential campaign. 

The bottom line is that Obama is like a chess player who sees ten moves ahead, and he's playing against people who range from guys who only see one or two moves ahead down to ones who don't even know that there's a chess game going on.  The Republicans haven't realized it yet, but Obama is just like Bill Clinton is that respect.  He's simply way better at this than they are. 

I know that there are a lot of things about Sarah Palin that are extremely disturbing, and this is relatively minor, but for some reason this just made me completely lose my mind.  I recently read Miss Congeniality's do-over of the Katie Couric question about what news sources she read.  First she said she read the New York Times.  OK, we all know that's ridiculous.  But then she said that she also read The Economist.  I lost it.  I read The Economist, it is very high-level (although too right-of-center) and information-packed about the entire world, and I am here to tell you that Sarah Palin has never read The Economist.  In fact, she has never laid eyes on it.  In fact, I am completely certain that she has never even been in a building that has ever even contained a copy of The Economist.  Sarah Palin is not simply unaware of all the information and ideas contained in The Economist.  She is anti-aware of all of it.  Her knowledge of topics covered in The Economist is not just zero, it is an enormous negative number. 

If Sarah Palin entered a room full of people reading The Economist her presence would immediately erase from their memories everything they had ever read in the magazine.  If Sarah Palin ever tried to read a copy of The Economist, they would suddenly fly apart and be pinned to opposite walls of the room by gigantic forces of magnetic repulsion.  Sarah Palin claiming to read The Economist is like Donald Trump claiming to be a Buddhist or Pope Benedict claiming to be an Ultimate Fighting Champion.  It astonishes me how some people can make claims about themselves with a straight face that are not only untrue, but so obviously untrue that everyone can see it.  Paris Hilton is no genius, but she knows enough not to tell people that she's an astrophysicist.  Why can't Sarah Palin be at least as smart as Paris Hilton?