Since the summer, I’ve pretty regularly been watching Joe Scarborough and his crew on Morning Joe on MSNBC. He’s pretty good–a middle-of-the-road, non-doctrinaire conservative–although he does have a tendency to overtalk his guests and especially his co-host, the long-suffering Mika Brzensinski. Joe has been pretty hard to take the last couple of weeks, as though he feels a particular burden to maintain some drama in an election that pretty nearly flatlined after the final debate, and a particular obligation to land some punches on Barack Obama, who is proving to be as Teflon-coated as Ronald Reagan ever was. This morning Scarborough nearly cross-examined Chuck Todd until he finally got NBC’s numbers cruncher to admit that yes, there was a way that McCain could still win the election. Todd then leveled Scarborough with the the offhand observation that, of course, the chances of McCain getting 270 electoral votes were just about the same as Obama’s chances of getting 370. And if that’s my choice, I’ll bet the rent on Obama getting 370. This election is going to be a repudiation–a repudiation of Bush and Cheney, of a free market arrogance and greed, of McCain’s mismanagement, of his cynical choie of Palin, of all kinds of nasty business. On Tuesday, the American people are going to clean house, Joe Scarborough’s fantasies notwithstanding.
