Final thoughts on the campaign

In a few hours it’ll all be over but the shouting.
I’ve stopped looking at polls, stopped pouring over the prognostications, given up riding the highs and lows of the wildly varying expert predictions of how it will all come out.
Now it’s just a matter of waiting for the final poll to come out — the one being cast by actual voters and not subject to weighting, spin and biases.
I won’t even guess how today will end, or whether we’ll even know anything today.
I’ve thought all along that this was Mitt Romney’s election to win or lose. Obama’s job performance did not earn him a second term. That’s borne out by job approval numbers still below 50 percent heading into Election Day.
Romney had to convince the electorate that he could do better, and in the final weeks of the campaign he finally figured out how to do that. Was it too little too late? We’ll know later.
But he faced an enormous challenge. All of the scrutiny of the campaign was on him, his record, his proposals. In the three debates, the majority of the time was spent discussing the merits of Romney’s ideas, rather than the president’s record.
His campaign slips were magnified way out of porportion, while Obama was given a pass.
Over the past week, the headlines focused on Romney’s dumb remarks about Jeeps in China, while the folding Benghazi scandal engulfing Obama’s White House was all but ignored.
When Hurricane Sandy hit the East Coast, the media declared Obama’s response a success and allowed him to head back to the campaign trail, even though the people of Staten Island remain in conditions rivaling those of post-Katrina New Orleans.
That’s how this campaign has gone. What should have been a referendum on the incumbent became all about taking apart the challenger.
Should Romney win today despite having to take on both a president willing to say and do anything to hold his job and a media that allowed him to get away with it, it will be an historic acheivement.