My position and Buck’s (see below) were identical. I too, thought the election was going to be very close. And I rode the same roller coaster of ups and downs as he did during the events leading up to the election. That is not coincidental.

I also thought Romney had a slight edge but that Obama could still pull off a squeaker if he got lucky (as he did with Sandy and Christie). It’s no disgrace being wrong, no one can predict the future, especially if its a close call like this one looked like at the time. The polls may have ultimately been accurate, but there was no way of knowing that ahead of time, they have been wrong before. Republicans were wise to be suspicious of them. It was the smart thing for Democrats to hold their breath and cross their fingers, and Republicans to be cautiously optimistic and work like crazy to seal the bargain.

What we saw instead was an orgy of smug swagger and arrogance from the GOP and its partisans. As the new Right seems wont to do, they created an imaginary world that suited their fantasies and then bragged to each other about it, taking their own echoed self-congratulation as evidence of their fundamental astuteness. They simply saw only what they wanted to see, and had no trouble coming up with “facts” to support that conclusion. They then analyzed these facts and came up with their inevitable and inescapable conclusions. Sound familiar? Its starting to become their distinctive, defining characteristic. It even has a name: the “Bubble”.

This manifested itself beautifully here on the Zone. Although thoughtful conservatives like Jody, RobVG and FrankC could sense it might go either way and were models of caution, TB was actually counting the days, like a kid waiting for Santa. SDAI was so cocky and outrageous, even insulting, that I still wonder if he’s not actually a Marxist rabble-rouser doing everything he can to discredit legitimate and responsible conservatives by portraying the Right as a generation of vipers.

The outcome of the election was not a sure thing to anyone, except perhaps those highly skilled in the arts of prognostication and election forecasting and with high confidence in their methods. But the general response of the Left and Right to it tells us volumes about their corresponding psychologies. The Left was cautious and undecided, even timid; the Right could only see the evidence that supported their preconceptions and prejudices.

They interpreted the data available about the universe so it coincided with their vision and desires. No surprises there.