Matt Taibbi Insists the Election Is Already Over

Who’s going to win the next Super Bowl, Matt Taibbi? Photo: Neilson Barnard/Getty Images

The polls show Barack Obama and Mitt Romney essentially tied, and we’re still six months away from voting day, but Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi is chiding reporters and pundits for refusing to acknowledge that Obama already won:

The people who work for the wire services and the news networks are physically incapable of writing sentences like, “This election is even more over than the Knicks-Heat series.” They are required, if not by law then by neurological reflex, to describe every presidential campaign as “fierce” and “drawn-out” and “hotly-contested.”

Are they physically incapable of writing that? Or maybe they don’t write it because the election is not even remotely close to being over, and it would be a ridiculous thing to write (for most people!).

Are they physically incapable of writing that? Or maybe they don’t write it because the election is not even remotely close to being over, and it would be a ridiculous thing to write (for most people!).

But this campaign, relatively speaking, will not be fierce or hotly contested. Instead it’ll be disappointing, embarrassing, and over very quickly, like a hand job in a Bangkok bathhouse. And everybody knows it. It’s just impossible to take Mitt Romney seriously as a presidential candidate. Even the news reporters who are paid to drum up dramatic undertones are having a hard time selling Romney as half of a titanic title bout.

The power of precognition must be both a gift and a curse for Taibbi. On the one hand, it allows him to foretell with certainty the outcome of a presidential election that won’t be decided for half a year, but on the other hand, he also knew Bruce Willis was dead the whole time.

We just watched it again. It was unbearably awkward.  We’re not sure why a brief moment of awkwardness that Romney shared with some black youths four years ago means that Romney has “no chance” to beat Obama, though. Apparently, when Taibbi peered into his crystal ball, he saw that the economy, the debates, hundreds of speeches and interviews, and an untold number of unexpected external events were not as important a factor in the outcome of the race as was Romney’s difficulty connecting with black teenagers.