The Incongruity of it All

The media is regarding the election of Barack Obama to the presidency as a foregone conclusion and the pollsters seem to back up that conclusion. If that is indeed the case, so be it. As Ed Koch, the former mayor of New York, put it with superb prescience after losing in the primaries to his eventual successor, David Dinkens: "The people have spoken. It is now time for the people to be punished." Dinkens' spectacular ineptitude led to his being soundly defeated for re-election after only one term by a Republican(!), Rudy Giuliani (Dinkens, the mayoral equivalent of Jimmy Carter, has been bitter about it ever since). New York City flourished during Giuliani's administration. Similarly, our nation will survive an Obama administration and will surely flourish anew in time.

What I don't understand, however, is how we got to this point. Our nation has long been center-right politically and I have not sensed a great leftward shift of the political ethos unless the traditional left-wing slant of the media now accurately reflects the views of the majority of Americans. I think not so how to explain the numerous polls showing Obama over McCain, with leads ranging from a few points to well into the double-digits? The estimable Roger Kimball is scratching his head over that, as do I. Kimball writes:

If the pundits are to be believed, the American people are just about to elect as President a man who espouses in concentrated form just about every bad, discredited, and exploded social and economic idea of the last fifty years.

[snip]

In other words, Obama plans to resuscitate the welfare policies of the Great Society, but by stealth. It will be the same thing–the dole–but it will be called a “tax credit,” which has a more emollient sound than “relief,” “public charity,” “the dole.”

Yet Americans are overwhelmingly opposed to income redistribution. So what gives? It just does not seem plausible the people's dissatisfaction with John McCain, not to mention the president and Republicans in general, is so intense they would line up behind a candidate who is the re-incarnation of Eugene Debs. Is it possible so many polls could be so out of whack, that there is some fatal flaw to their design that skews the results? Is it possible the polls are wrong?

UPDATE: Others are wondering the same but I am not optimistic.