I know Eggplant is not an Obamatron. I think he is a man of science inclined to give numbers too much credence, forgetting the axiom “Garbage In, Garbage Out”.

My guess on the case of the disappearing polls is that it’s a couple of things:

1. There *is* an Obama / Bradley effect going on that no one has figured out what it is or how to measure it. It’s skewing the numbers, but then we know the pollsters deliberately skew the numbers in the first place, calling mostly young black Democrats, for example. I don’t think what ever the “Obama effect” is, that it’s racism. Or put it this way, I’d be surprised if it’s racism. It could equally be Muslim-ism or anti-Michelle-ism but I do think there is some kind of measureable effect that’s skewing the polls that hasn’t been allowed for.

2. Who do we think the actual pollsters are? Who are the people at Gallup and Rasmussen who make up and craft the questions to be asked, choose the phone numbers to be called, and tally the results? What are the chances they have the same demographics as journalists and educators?

3. Are polls being taken so those companies can make money? What would happen if a generous person named George Soros or Abdullah Saud or Vladimir Putin came in and offered Such&So Poll Company a VERY generous amount of money to make sure the polls said such and so, and said them consistently over a period of weeks or months?

4. Doesn’t it seem like the polls and the media are in a shark / remora situation so that each needs and feeds off the other in an endless cycle? If the media have cast their lot in with Obama and face a death knell if he doesn’t win, equally the pollsters are being cited daily by those same media and need the media to survive so that the next cycle will stay as-is. The pollsters would be nuts not to produce the numbers that they know will be picked up for headlines, or it would hurt their bottom line.

Bottom line is that neither the media nor the polling companies owe any sort of fealty to the American public to produce truth or accurate results. The polls have been madly wrong before, and it’s so much worse now I can’t imagine why we’d believe a number they say.