Making predictions can be easy work - The coming Obama inauguration

Readers of this column should know by now that I was the first person to go on the record predicting Barack Obama would be our next President (I did it on April 18th of last year). It was my Official Groundbreaking Prediction of 2007 and once he’s elected, I’ll naturally assume the title of America’s Smartest Pundit. The fact that anyone would doubt how this election is going to turn out literally makes me laugh out loud. My Official Groundbreaking Prediction of 2008 is that the Obama inauguration next January will be the cultural, social, and political event of a generation; like Woodstock meets the March on Washington, with every minute of every day covered by talk radio and all three cable news networks. The part I’m really going to like is that Rush Limbaugh and Fox News won’t know what to do with themselves.

Hillary Clinton knows it’s over. She isn’t going to drop out of the race until she absolutely has to, but she’s basically just running out the clock. Don’t cry for her, though, because she and Bill have made nine figures since they left Washington, so they’ll be in a really nice car as they roll on down the Huckabee Highway to a place called irrelevance.

John McCain is a real American hero, but for a new generation of voters who grew up with the image of the Pimpin’ President, he doesn’t fit the part. People born in the 70’s and 80’s think of John McCain as that grandfather you never see because he has to stay in Arizona for the climate more than they think of him as a guy they want in the White House. Plus we don’t need a man who may have Post Traumatic Stress Disorder with his finger on the button. It’s dangerous. He’ll be alright, though. His married the daughter of a really wealthy beer distributor and she’s worth somewhere in the neighborhood of nine figures herself (maybe John McCain’s pimp hand is stronger than I thought).

So there we’ll all be on election night, face-to-face with the unthinkable: A black President. Parents will keep their kids up to watch the networks call it for Barack in a thirty-point landslide, trying in vain to explain the historic significance of the moment to a child whose mind doesn’t understand the concept of racism. It makes me think of the first time Tiger Woods won the Masters. Golf fans of all descriptions would look at each other in amazement and say, “can you believe this guy?” The exact same thing is going to happen at bus stops and on bar stools all over the country. One stranger will look at another and ask, “can you believe this guy?” To which the other stranger will respond, “I voted for him.”

After the numbers are pored over and analyzed in excruciating detail for about a week, the buzz around the inaugural address will begin. This will be the first time Fox News will call something “make or break” for the Obama presidency, but it won’t be the last. The network will say the fact that he won the election by a two-to-one margin means he must be all things to all people or he’s betraying his mandate; basically holding him to a standard of perfection. It won’t matter, though, because Barack grew up black in America, so he’s used to having to be far and away better than the next guy in order to be thought of as equal to him.

Plus, he will have beaten Hillary Clinton - who wouldn’t accept her own defeat until he had won more states, more delegates, more votes, and the endorsement of every Democrat she and her husband pissed off on their way from Little Rock, Arkansas to Westchester, New York (what I like to call the “payback is a b*itch” scenario). After driving a stake through the heart of the undead thing that was the Clinton campaign, Fox News will seem like cake and ice cream to President Obama.

By Thanksgiving, every airline will have sold every seat on every flight into Washington, D.C. By Christmas, all the trains will be sold out as well. By New Year’s Day, every church group and suburban school district with the means will be renting any buses and vans they can find to get their people to our nation’s capital. By early January, every hotel room in the D.C. area will be booked (at outrageous rates, I may add) and people will start camping out on the National Mall. And after the Obama inauguration, there will be only two kinds of people in this country: Those who were actually there to see it, and those who will lie and say they were.

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