Been wondering what happened to Obama's talk of ending the war in Iraq... Wondering what happened to the "change we can believe in..." (Biden?). Been wondering if this is the most brilliantly run campaign in the history of campaigns, or the biggest set up for the biggest bummer ever... In this political season, been reading the good Dr. Thompson's Fear And Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72. Instructive:

"If George [McGovern] gets stomped in November, it will not be because of anything Richard Nixon did to him. The blame will trace straight back to his brain-trust, to whoever had his ear tight enough to convince him that all that bullshit about 'new politics' was fine for the primaries, but it would never work against Nixon—so he would have to abandon his original power base, after Miami, and swiftly move to consolidate the once he'd just shattered: the Meany/Daley/Humphrey/Muskie axis, the senile remnants of the Democratic Party's once-powerful 'Roosevelt coalition.'
McGovern agreed..."

"This may be the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves; finally just lay back and say it—that we really are just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.
The tragedy of all this is that George McGovern, for all his mistakes and all his imprecise talk about 'new politics' and 'honesty in government,' is one of the few men who've run for President of the United States in this century who really understands what a fantastic monument to all the best instincts of the human race this country might have been, if we could have kept it out of the hands of greedy little hustlers like Richard Nixon..."

"'Ominous' is not quite the right word for a situation where one of the most consistently unpopular politicians in American history [Nixon] suddenly skyrockets to Folk Hero status while his closest advisors are being caught almost daily in nazi-style gigs that would have embarrassed Martin Bormann.
How long will it be before the 'demented extremists' in Germany, or maybe Japan, start calling us a Nation of Pigs? How would Nixon react? 'No comment'? And how would the popularity polls react if he just came right out and admitted it?..."

"Until November 7 [election day, 1972], it had not been considered entirely fashionable to go around calling ex-Attorney General John Mitchell a 'prophet' because of his smiling prediction, in the summer of 1970, that 'This country is going so far to the right that you won't recognize it."