One virtue of having a reputation as a straight-talker is that you can get away with constant lying. For example, in response to a question about why he twice voted against a commission to investigate the response to Hurricane Katrina, John McCain says he voted in favor of every investigation. In reality, just as the New Orleans local news reporter said, he twice voted against a commission to investigate the matter.

Now there's probably some crazy strained reading of McCain's remarks so that his claims are consistent with reality. And since everyone knows McCain's a straight-talker, the press will read it that way. And because that's been the press's response each of the dozens of times in the course of this campaign that McCain's told bald-faced lies, his reputation for straight-talk never vanishes. A lesser figure who was in the habit of constantly lying and flip-flopping would develop a reputation as a kind of madmen, so invested in self-love that he thinks he has no obligation to political principles or basic factual accuracy.

Polling data seem to support the conclusion that despite the unpopularity of his party, John McCain has a realistic chance of keeping the White House in Republican hands. McCain has been running neck-and-neck with Obama in most recent national polls. In the May 21st Gallup tracking poll, for example, Obama held a narrow 47 to 44 percent lead over McCain.

The problem with such early horserace polls, however, is that they are not very accurate predictors of the actual election results. Polls in the spring of 1988 showed Michael Dukakis with a comfortable lead over George H.W. Bush and polls in June of 1992 showed Bill Clinton running third behind both Bush and H. Ross Perot. So recent polls showing a close race between McCain and Obama may not tell us much about what to expect in November...

Three indicators of the national political climate have accurately predicted the outcomes of presidential elections since the end of World War II: the incumbent president's approval rating at mid-year, the growth rate of the economy during the second quarter of the election year, and the length of time the president's party has held the White House....

These three factors can be combined to produce an Electoral Barometer score that measures the overall national political climate. The formula for computing this score is simply the president's net approval rating (approval minus disapproval) in the Gallup Poll plus five times the annual growth rate of real GDP minus 25 if the president's party has held the White House for two terms or longer. Mathematically, this formula can be written as:

An Electoral Barometer reading of -63 would predict a decisive defeat for the Republican presidential candidate. The only election since World War II with a score in this range was 1980. In that election Jimmy Carter suffered the worst defeat for an incumbent president since Herbert Hoover in 1932. The second lowest score, -50, occurred in 1952. That was the last election in which neither the incumbent president, Democrat Harry Truman, nor the incumbent vice-president appeared on the ballot. Nevertheless, the candidate trying to succeed Truman, Democrat Adlai Stevenson, lost in a landslide.