jmoiron.net

I feel pretty confident now, 11 days before the 2008 US Presidential Election, that Barack Obama will win and I won't have to flee the country in search of sanity and mental health. This is presuming that the recent polls are within their stated margin of error and that massive voter fraud the likes of which likely happened in 2004 and 2000 does not make up for McCain's current deficit.

When all is said and done, the world-scale economic meltdown of the past month will be the "October Surprise" that shifted a close race (leaning McCain, by many counts) to a comfortable Obama victory. There's still the matter of actually voting for the candidate, so please, if you are registered, even in a state like New York where recent polls show a +20 point lead for Obama.

FiveThirtyEight currently shows McCain with a < 4% chance of electoral victory, and has Obama leading in Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, North Carolina, Colorado, Florida, Pennsylvania, and Michigan.

Electoral-vote has 260 electoral votes for Obama in "strong democrat" states, with another 26 in "weak democrat", giving Obama the magic number even if he loses all states currently in contention.

A lot is made of the way the candidates play the political game these days. In serious gaming journalism, the term 'meta-game' has been co-opted to mean roughly a game that exists outside the conventional definitions of success & failure within the game. Although the original meta-game might be bluffing in poker, the tense interplay of poking & parrying in SF3:3s or the attempt to fully chain or 1-life a shmup are also examples: the meta-game in the latter goes beyond a mere attempt to complete "the game", but rather to maximize ancillary (and practically useless) subsystems within the game. Swordless Zelda 1 is possibly another good example.

The way that politics is played as a game that almost eclipses the very real importance of guiding a country of 300m people should be shocking. It's the elevation of public relations, which is essentially propaganda (in it's original uncorrupted usage), to be the defining element of political discourse. The truth of Joe the Plumber does not matter except insomuch as it alters or shapes the narrative of the campaign.

There's a lot of utility in this for the major players in US politics. Meta-games are usually far more conducive to specialization; it's difficult to 1-credit Ikaruga, but it's an impossibly rare skill to 1-credit it controlling both players with near-full combos. Thus, meta-games generally offer more opportunity for the punditry to take a roll (of cash money). Today, when something happens, a "senior republican strategist" and a "senior democratic strategist" are invited onto a show, they deliver carefully crafted talking points in order to shape narrative (writing these must be almost a meta-meta-game!), and they amicably sign off and are reinvited regardless of how ridiculous and contradictory they've made themselves. This election cycle, this has gone beyond mere meta status. Outside of precious little detail offered about the economy (McCain's knee-jerk STOP THE PRESSES moments), this election has been entirely about the meta-game with little if no actual game. Even so, it's a game Obama will win.