Tell me when it's over...

This weekend I've found myself scrupulously avoiding the news and online political discussions... I just can't think about the Iowa caucuses that will take place tomorrow. I don't want to read about them, can't take all of the polling that shows the gap among the candidates closing; it makes my stomach clench and my breathing get all shallow and wonky. I am so emotionally invested in Dean's candidacy that I'm not sure how I'll handle it if he loses; yes, yes - I'm in the ABB camp and will support whichever candidate wins the nomination. Of course. And in all honestly, the rational part of me doesn't think Dean will lose... in fact, that rational part thinks he's going to win by a decent margin.

Then, there's the irrational part, the part that fears that my support of Dean's candidacy has doomed him before he even started. After all, I seem to have that effect on sports teams, to an almost astonishing degree. Ask Michigan's football team who did just fine all season when I wasn't paying attention, then lost the Rose Bowl quite handily as I sat watching in my maize-and-blue garb, singing "Hail to the Victors" with an increasing note of desperation in my voice. Or how about the Mariners who, after leading the division for most of the summer, simply folded in August and September - just as I started to get interested in the pennant race. Sticking with baseball, we also have the ill-fated Red Sox (who I only started rooting for in the playoffs because I so detest the Yankees), and my favourite National League team, the Cubs. All of these teams achieved great success... until I started actively supporting them.

(No, I haven't forgotten about the Tigers... I may be irrational, but even I can't take responsbility for the suckitude they achieved last year.)

I certainly don't mean to trivialize this Presidential race by comparing it to a sports competition, but you can't deny the similarities. Each candidate has his fan... supporter base. Each employs strategy, a game plan designed to outmanouver the other candidates. The race will have a winner... and several losers. And as we've seen, all it takes is one bad call on the part of the refs ("I dissent.") to change the outcome - goodbye President Gore, hello pResident Bush.

So I guess that what I'm really doing by sticking my fingers in my ears (La la la, I can't hear you!), by feigning disinterest in this whole thing (Oh, is Iowa tomorrow? I've just been so busy I'd forgotten.) is capitulating to that irrational part. Like the superstitious old woman who insists that her new grandbaby is actually quite plain and unremarkable, maybe I too can fool the malevolent spirits (who bear a remarkable resemblence, I think, to Karl Rove) into casting their evil eye elsewhere and leaving my guy alone. A hell of a lot depends on it.