During the primaries, the political prediction business -- all those glib quasi-certainties spouted by TV talking heads and embedded in the opening paragraphs of newspaper and magazine articles -- gave us such fantasies as Rudy Giuliani masquerading as a serious presidential candidate and mistakenly consigned John McCain to the GOP dust heap. Remember when Hillary Clinton was prematurely anointed as the nominee or the dire warnings that a protracted Clinton-Obama primary fight would, in a typical burst of Democratic self-destructiveness, cost the party the White House?
Of course, that was all long ago and everyone involved in these bum calls has been sent to their rooms without supper. But what about the errors of the last two months -- the equally fallacious theories about the fall campaign that have been the stuff of Sunday morning round tables and newspaper Op-Ed pages? Granted, we at Salon have sometimes stumbled on the road to omniscience. But that shared sense of humility does not dampen our glee in pointing out the punditocracy's Seven Biggest Blunders, homestretch edition.
Their story then details seven times the pundits dropped the ball. They are:
1) The Cult of Sarah Palin
2) Steve Schmidt Is a Genius
3) The Price at the Pump Will Fuel the Mood of the Voters\
4) Obama Should Have Taken the Money ... and Run
5) Obama Was Guilty of Hubris in Trying to Expand the Map
6) Down-ballot Democrats Will Flee From Obama
7) The Hillary Holdouts Will Never Come Back
The Conventional Wisdom is that Madden and Shapiro got it right.
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