http://pjmedia.com/blog/election-predictions-from-pj-media-columnists/
PREDICTIONS, EVEN FROM THIS ILLUSTRIOUS GROUP ARE AS GOOD AS POLLS,….AT THIS MOMENT I AM REDUCED TO PRAYERS AND SUPERSTITION AND MOOD RANGES FROM DESPAIR TO GLEE…..STAY TUNED….RSK
ROGER L. SIMON
I have never been superstitious. But this election is so important, so really… titanic… that I find myself suddenly throwing the I Ching and reaching for Ouija boards to determine what will happen.
Well, not really, because as a natural worrier (an ethnic tradition) I often fear the future and part of me doesn’t want to know. And this time more than ever because an Obama victory would mean the country I love is not what I think it is, that it has turned into a land of thoughtless sheep.
Nevertheless the part of me that is not superstitious trusts the one person who knows more about elections than anyone I know — my friend Michael Barone. Michael says Romney will win. So I’m choosing to believe him, when my blood sugar is okay anyway.
But as another man once said, “Trust, but verify.” We will all verify on Tuesday.
– Roger L. Simon [1] is the co-founder and CEO of PJ Media.
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON
I think Romney will win by a point and the Republicans will come up one or two seats short in the Senate. Three things are happening in Obama’s favor. First, the time between the debate lengthens, and the electorate now sees him prancing around in a bomber jacket, not as the petulant, interrupting, unpresidential sophist who seemed unappealing before millions on TV. Second, the storm simply cut short Romney’s momentum: one day all the stories were about Romney’s new huge crowds and soaring clips of his message, the next day Obama and Chris Christie, arm in arm on the shore, dominated the news, with gaga media reports of presidential leadership. Third, the news from Benghazi just gets worse each day — and the silence from the Romney campaign becomes deafening. There is this quiet recognition that all hell is going to break loose after the election, but for some reason criticism of the deadly catastrophe has become off-limits. So I can see why a week ago Romney was starting to create wave-like momentum, but now, based on independent voting and Republican turnout, I think he has just enough thrust left to hang on by a point — if he can barnstorm and give ‘em hell these last two days.
– Victor Davis Hanson [2] is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow in Residence in Classics and Military History at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, a professor of Classics Emeritus at California State University, Fresno, and a nationally syndicated columnist for Tribune Media Services.
CLAUDIA ROSETT
It seems safe to predict that if President Obama wins, it will be close. If there’s a landslide coming, it’s for Romney. But apart from that, I’d be lying to suggest that I could with any confidence foretell which way this election will go. Were this the America of, say, 32 years ago, I’d be predicting a Romney landslide, and a GOP majority in the Senate. But for all the torrents of data, demographics, and media accounts now at our fingertips, I think the character of this country is harder to gauge right now than at any time I can remember. I don’t trust the polls, and I don’t know how much weight the voters at the margin will assign to the latest weekly-news-cycle photo-op tableaus flashing across the iPad screen, or the realities of terror in Benghazi, and an economy choking on red tape and burying itself in government debt, for which the real bills have not yet begun to come due.
We have seen a massive expansion of the entitlement state, and a troubling loss of memory about the vital role and full virtues of free markets — not only in creating wealth, but in protecting freedom. We have tried abdicating world leadership, but the ensuing tumult is only beginning to make itself felt. Modern technology has made us richer than I think we have fully been able to measure, and yet I am reminded too often these days of T.S. Eliot’s line: “Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” The jury is out right now, on whether the boundless proliferation of 140 character tweets enhances or substitutes for backbone and clarity of thought, and whether such luxuries would have helped or hindered Paul Revere. We will know the results of this election soon enough (barring the nightmare of an endless recount). It is this election itself that will provide some badly needed insight into the basic character of 2012 America. (I’ve placed my bet, with a couple of folks whose company I prize. The stakes are modest: the losers pay for a round of pulled pork sandwiches at a local pub. But this was more by way of a hedge than a prediction — banking on an evening in good company, whatever happens at the polls.)
– Claudia Rosett [3] is journalist-in-residence with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and heads its Investigative Reporting Project.
ROGER KIMBALL
Romney is going to win, big time. Why? I can tell you in three syllables and a few numbers. The syllables are: Ben-gha-zi. We will not get to the bottom of the cover-up of why Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans were left to die in that god-forsaken Libyan city, their desperate calls for help repeatedly ignored, before the election. But it has been clear for some time now that there was a cover-up of major proportions. The story is note being pursued by the New York Times or other representatives of the legacy media. (Just imagine what round-the-clock howls of indignation and rage the legacy media would be emitting over this heinous bit of political calculation were there a Republican administration in office!) But the studied “hear-no-evil, see-no-evil, report-no-evil” if it comes from the Left has not done the trick this time. The “Fast and Furious” scandal, which has left scores of Mexicans and at least two Americans dead, has been effectively keep from public consciousness. This is not the case with the Benghazi scandal. Hardly a day goes by now when more details are revolved and repeated by the alternative media from giants like Fox News to the hundreds of bloggers that do the job the legacy media has avoided. As my colleague Roger L. Simon suggested on PJ Media last week, even if (per impossible) Obama were reelected, he would likely face impeachment proceedings of a virulence that would make Watergate appear like a walk through the park.
But Benghazi is a late-breaking scandal. I had put Romney down as the victor long before the September 11 attacks in Libya. The reason can be summed up in a few numbers:
