Fright Nights

It is Halloween night and across the land the most frightened people are not those at the Haunted Farm or local movie scream-a-thon. No, the most frightened people are Democrats who cannot stand that there are still a full Saturday, Sunday, Monday and part of a Tuesday before votes are counted. That means there is still time for a seeming assured win to turn into a loss.

Two years ago, a political cartoon epitomized the view of Democrats. A small donkey dressed as Charlie Brown faced Lucy with the football. Lucy says something like, "All the polls show you ahead."

It was the perfect metaphor for the Democratic attitude, especially during a presidential election year. In my lifetime, Democrats have won only 4 presidential elections. That kind of losing means you keep waiting for "something" bad to happen. Chicago Cub fans understand perfectly what I'm talking about.

What "something" will go wrong? It doesn't matter. It could be that aliens from the planet Zenon are secretly backing Obama. This fear isn't about reality. It is about simple paranoia. I have had Democrats saying things to me like "I'll believe when I see it" and "Are you optimistic about Tuesday?" This is the attitude when every Electoral College analysis you can find outside of the McCain campaign has Obama winning more than the 270 electoral votes needed. Even Karl Rove has an Electoral College prediction with Obama at 311. Democrats will only see that as a sign of a Republican conspiracy to make Democratic voters complacent.

Luckily, the Democrats who are cool under pressure are Barack Obama and his campaign staff. Through the entire year they have lived up to their "No Drama Obama" nickname. Through the primaries they stuck with a clear strategy and made it work. In the summer while numerous Democrats wanted them to be blitzing the airwaves with ads against McCain, they worked on building their ground organizations. When the Republican convention bounce boosted McCain, they just kept moving forward and didn't jump to "do something dramatic" when the financial crisis hit. They left it to McCain to look foolish by saying he would suspend his campaign and wanted the first debate canceled. It blew up in his face and Obama has been running ahead every since.

In this last weekend, the ground game built in the summer is paying off. Thousands of staffers and the volunteers they have trained and empowered have been helping bring out the millions of early voters in key battleground states. These voters are heavily Democratic in most battleground states and places like Colorado are expecting to see more than half their voters before election day. The overall turnout is expected to top the 122 million from 204 and there is a possibility that we will see the highest turnout since 1960.

All indicators point to great night for Democrats on Tuesday. What they hope to see is the return of the political cartoon from the day after the 2006 campaign. Lucy and the little donkey Charlie Brown looking up in wonder as the football soared through the goalposts.

Then they'll start worrying about how the return of "the rightwing conspiracy" from the 1990's set to destroy another Democratic presidency.