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to make the Obama version, and if McCain somehow wins, we' re basically
just totally screwed." Likewise, Garry Trudeau gambled that Obama would
win, and his syndicated Doonesbury strip--published the day after the
election--depicted three soldiers in Iraq watching the returns on TV as a
reporter is saying, "And it' s official--Barack Obama has won."

Some editors were undecided about whether to publish it. Trudeau
encouraged them to choose hope over fear. "If I' m wrong," he told the
Los Angeles Times, "it' ll be my face that' ll be covered with eggs, not
theirs." Times editors had decided, in the interest of accuracy, to wait for
the election results, and if Obama won, they would publish the strip on
Thursday, but then they must have realized it was just a comic strip, not
investigative journalism, and they published it on Wednesday after all.

Trudeau thought that newspapers should run the strip because
"polling data gives McCain a 3.7% chance of victory." Indeed, a week
after Obama' s win, McCain himself admitted to Jay Leno, "I can read the
polls--they tried to keep ' em from me." There were dozens of polls,
from ABC to Zogby, and, psychographic sophistication aside, they didn' t
always exactly agree. For example, in Nevada during the last week of
October, one poll put Obama' s lead at 12%, another at 7%, another at
5% and two others at 4%, which meant that, given the margin of sampling

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