CT Blue

A little comfort food for Democrats sent to me by a friend today. The election is in the bag for Obama.
 

American University professor Allan Lichtman has issued his “sure fire” prediction for the outcome of the November 2012 election.
 
Lichtman is no crystal ball gazer. His predictions are based on a formula he developed in 1981 in collaboration with a Russian geophysicist, who had previously specialized in creating models used to forecast earthquakes. Their approach was based on a thorough analysis of the forces at work in shaping the political landscape in every U.S. presidential elections from 1860 to 1980. From this examination they developed their predictive model. And since then, Lichtman has used it to correctly forecast the outcome of every election from 1984 through 2008.

 
Lichtman has identified 13 “keys” to electoral success, and right now Obama is on the downside of no more than 5 of them.
 

Nevertheless, this still leaves a maximum of 10 “Keys” and a minimum of eight “Keys” in the president’s favor, enough for Lichtman, who has never been wrong, to confidently predict Obama’s reelection in November.

 
One of the 13 keys has to do with charisma, a key Obama certainly had in 2008. The bloom is off the rose right now, but it looks like that will not be a  factor in 2012. You can apply lots of adjectives to Romney, most of them pejorative, but “charismatic” is not among them. Even on that score, Obama wins.
 
Not to denigrate Lichtman’s record of success, but when I read this the first thing I thought about was Karl Rove, who was a political genius until, all of a sudden, he wasn’t anymore. Lichtman is probably smarter than Rove, but I take this with a giant grain of salt. He’s never been wrong, but that doesn’t mean he’ll always be right. None of his keys, for example, take into account the combined effects of voter suppression and Citizens United and the extent to which the American people have been propagandized against Obama is unprecedented.  Still, I’d rather he was predicting an Obama victory than one for Willard, and, as I’ve been saying all along, if I had to bet, I’d bet on Lichtman maintaining his winning streak.