One of the best insights about politics I’ve ever heard is that the Conventional Wisdom is *always* wrong. Always.

You can’t always tell *how* it’s wrong, but it always is, because CW is generally premised on the unstated underlying assumption that everything will happen pretty much the way it did in the last election. This is always pretty questionable, but I think it’s extremely questionable for this particular election, since we’ve had little things like 9/11 and the War for Civilization start between November 2000 and now.

But the CW says that doesn’t matter, and people pretty much rank “national security” and “Iraq” as just random issues in the Big National Pile O’ Issues, not all that much more or less important than school uniforms or how many shovels full of free prescription drugs to throw at senior citizen voting blocs.

I wish I had a lot of confidence about how it’ll play out exactly, but I doubt it’ll look much like 2000.