Economic Models Predict Obama Win by 'Decent Margin'

clipped from www.reuters.com It really is the economy, stupid! Economic models that have correctly predicted the winner of almost all post-war U.S. presidential elections say recession fears will secure a victory for Barack Obama in November. Three separate studies showed the Democratic presidential hopeful winning between 52 and 55 percent of the popular vote on November 4, based on current gloomy economic estimates. "The economy is certainly not going to be a positive for the Republicans," said Ray Fair, an economics professor at Yale university who built the earliest of the models in 1978. "It is a decent margin but it is not a landslide," said Fair, who ran the numbers in April. "It would have been much larger if there had been a recession in 2008."

After years and years of claiming to be the fiscally responsible party, the GOP's cred on economic issues has tanked. The "trickle down" economics that Republicans have adopted since Reagan have turned out to be a bust, mostly because it's a bass-ackward idea that wealth moves down the economic ladder, not up. It was always a welfare program for the wealthy and that's never been so apparent as it is today.

So McCain's only hope is that lunatic mathematics magically begins working before now and Nov.

Frankly, I don't think there's much chance of that.