I'm watching the stories go by today, and I am reminded of a lesson I learned from my baseball coach when I was younger. It relates to how a team which is the best in the league can lose the championships simply because they convince themselves it is a sure thing.
You see, Obama is doing well... at this point in time. Sadly, there is not an election right now, or today, or anytime soon. In fact, polls that show anything now are as useless as trying to determine how many chickens you'll have in a year by counting the eggs you have in your basket now.
I will admit, I get as excited as everyone else when I glance at http://electoral-vote.com and see how well Obama is doing compared to McCain. However, if you were to look at the polling for most of the presidential races for the last 30+ years, the polls at this point of the game usually did not indicate anything as to who would win the election come November.
In fact, at this point, during the 1984 elections, it looked like a sure thing that Reagan was going to lose, and we all know what happened back then. However, we should be all wise enough to know this fact, especially those who supported Obama back when Clinton had a massive lead in December and November. Most of us also probably know the bias that when the public thinks that person A is going to win an election in general they are more likely to vote for them. So maintaining the buzz that it's a sure thing for Obama will likely help him to some degree.
Yet, why do I feel it's necessary to point out that our celebration is premature and potentially dangerous?
Well, let's do something it seems that American pundits love to do: use a sports analogy.
A professional sports team needs to always be practicing and improving their game. When you get up to the top in most professional leagues, it quickly turns into the Red Queen's race; "It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place." If a team becomes complacent, or overly confident, another team which has practiced more and worked harder can surprise the top team with an upset.
In my personal experience, when I was young and played baseball, one year I was lucky enough to be in the best team in the league (by sheer random chance). We all practiced hard early in the season and basically we were unbeatable. Every game we played was a cakewalk with the opposing team getting no runs and our team essentially decimating them.
Unfortunately, as the season progressed, we became cocky. The coach would be trying to get us to practice, but because we were winning so many games so trivially a lot of us didn't work as hard as we should have. We didn't notice that we were getting sloppy, simply because we were still doing so well regardless.
Well, in the final tournament for the season, we were given our just desserts. Due to our cockiness we didn't prepare as much as many of the other teams did for the tournament, and while we made it to the semi-finals reasonably solidly, it wasn't the cakewalk everyone was expecting.
In general, most people who cared assumed our team would simply win, but it was obvious after the quarter-finals that we were not doing as well as anyone had hoped. In the semi-finals, we lost. Just barely, but we lost by 2 runs. Our play had been sloppy and uncoordinated, mostly due to a lack of effort and preparation on our part.
The coach sat us all down after that game and congratulated us on a great season (we got an award for being the best team during the season, however the big prize in the league was the tournament prize), but then explained to us what happened. Our team was discouraged and frustrated, but it was clear that we lost because we just assumed we'd win. We lost because we stopped working to the degree necessary to win. We lost because we just became too darned cocky.
We all agreed, and went our separate ways.
It should be fairly obvious why I bring this up now. A considerable number of the articles I see today on DailyKos are not articles discussing strategy, encouraging grassroots action, or donations to Obama. No, a good number of them are posts where we are patting ourselves for doing such a good job and watching the polls come in.
Yes, we are doing a great job in the polls right now and hopefully that will keep up, but it's just like doing well during the season and not preparing for the tournament. When the real prize is the tournament at the end, if we don't keep on working at it, we will lose the competition that actually matters - the November election. If our work is to simply make the win that much more of a significant win, then the better off we will be. If we can get the Democratic nominee to not only win but completely shatter expectations, that would be awesome. However, if we get cocky and pat ourselves on the back and just barely lose. I think we'll all regret that we didn't do that little bit more we could have done.
So, if anyone is still here and agrees with me. I suggest that if you can, try to donate to Obama's campaign in some fashion. If you can donate money, then go to his site and do so. If you can donate time, then go to his site and volunteer your time. If you have a friend who isn't registered yet, help them register really early to vote. If you make tasty pies, make a pie for Obama, and invite your like-minded friends over to enjoy tasty pie. If you have any other suggestions, post them as a comment to this post to encourage people. By doing actionable things, let's help Obama not only win this election, but completely blow away all expectations.