Letters to the Editor
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Fortune-tellers are stupid
Sure, maybe McCain's staff is laughing at the idea of facing Hillary. Well, I think she'll wipe the grins off their faces pretty quick.
There's a famous expression in the movie business, "Nobody knows anything," that I wish political junkies would learn too. It was in William Goldman's book, "Adventures in the Screen Trade," about his life as a screenwriter. He had seen endless predictions of this being a hit, that being a flop, proved wrong over and over. People, directors, writers, are always saying they KNOW this or that will appeal to a demographic, but that's just to get money out of you; Goldman had the answer: Nobody knows anything. Political pundits in training ought to pay attention to that. Sure, you can make a plausible case for anything, but you just...don't...know. And you might even get people to invest in a story, in a director, and then it will bomb miserably, and they will hate you. And just when you think your career's over, somebody will give you more money for another film, because of your "track record," and that will be a huge hit. You don't know.
So stop it with, "X will do better against McCain, or Y will do better." The truth is, you're lying. You don't know.
I distinctly remember the speech that Bill Clinton gave in front of some steelworkers, during the time when he went from last to first, when I finally connected with him. Evidently, a lot of America did the same. Would anybody have seen that he would "beat Bush"? You'd have to have been a fortune teller to say that, and they're all frauds, you know.
The last theory of "inevitability" was Marx's inevitable triumph of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, and it turns out, there was nothing inevitable about that at all.