I Want To Believe

I do.  My GOD, I do.  You have no concept of how badly I want to see Barney Frank go down next Tuesday.  Songs would be sung about that day if Lollipop gets consigned to the political glue factory.  Heck, songs WILL be sung about that day regardless, but getting rid of that economic terrorist would raise them to such epically symbolic and poetically just levels that only a fat lady could sing them.

But a twelve point lead is a twelve point lead.  It's not within the margin of error.  It'd be closer than perhaps any race than the "Dude" has ever run, but close, as they say, only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades.

So does an internal poll showing Sean Bielat within the margin of error count as stunning news or doesn't it?  The rightosphere is split on that question.

On the "faith" side resides Ace:

I believe it.

Allah wanted to know why I thought that Boston Globe poll was wrong.

First, Charlie Cook said a few weeks ago that most media polls are horrible -- they pay doodly-squat for them, and get a commensurate level of work. He said 50% of media polls are simply bad polls, not even worth looking at, another 25% are merely mediocre, and only 25%, from respected polling firms, are worth a damn.

He also said he'd trust an internal poll - done by a company he knows and respects - over most media polls....

The minute [Frank's constituents] hear that they have a credible candidate, a Marine and engineer, who builds robots to protect our troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, they'll go for him. It's just a question of letting people know. And getting out the vote.

Whereas on the side of skepticism is found (as you probably expected) Eeyore:

Just one catch. Unless I missed it, there’s no actual hard number on where things stand in the race in the Fleming and Hayes memo. In fact, nowhere does the document itself say that Bielat’s within the margin of error; that’s F&H’s header for their post, but the closest the doc gets is claiming that Bielat’s very close or even ahead among specific groups, e.g., certain counties, audiences who’ve seen his ads, etc. The key takeaway is that the more people see of Bielat and the more they’re reminded of Frank’s record, the tighter the race gets — which leads to a none-too-subtle pitch for more money so that Bielat can blanket the district with ads over the next week.

IOW, who knows how close Bielat's internals REALLY show him to be, he's simply - and frantically - trying to raise enough cash to have a hope in hell of catching B.F. Dribbles at the finish line.

My inclination is to side with....Eeyore.  As fantastic a candidate as Sean Bielat is, the mountain he's attempting to scale is just too steep and too tall.  There's a reason, after all, why incumbents are so difficult to topple, and how much more so for a conservative Republican in a Donk district bluer than Eddie Murphy's stand up act used to be.  It's been a challenge as heroic as his rise has been meteoric, but as another adage reminds us, you can't win 'em all - even in a historic tsunami cycle like this one.

And yet....:

Remember, as of just a few weeks ago, this seat wasn’t even on the board. Then, for the first time in decades, MA-4 popped up in the “likely Democratic” column. And now, if you’ll pardon the pun, it’s moved a bit further to the right. I was thinking yesterday after I wrote that post about Bielat’s internal polling that maybe it wasn’t what it was cracked up to be: The topline number was conspicuously omitted (why would a pollster ever do that?) and the data was ten days old (are the more recent numbers so grim that they had to leak stale ones?). In hindsight, I thought, they were probably trying to put the best face on an increasingly bad situation. But now here comes Cook with the best news I’ve heard all day — to the point where I wonder if, miracle of miracles, we might actually see this seat in the “toss up” column come Monday. My friends, the wave is upon us.

Or maybe Cook is even farther behind than Fleming & Hayes and Lollipop is really pulling away.

I want to believe.  Really, I do.

But the Killer Robot-Builder is gonna have to show me.