So technically, these people aren’t pundits anymore.

Who couldn’t see this coming? Apart from the world’s smartest CEO and his cronies, that is.

The question of sincerity and why Bruce made the difference—OK, a key difference—in the final outcome brings us to the Romney and Snooki connection and the self-tanning controversy. It will be little noted nor long remembered, as some previous president once wrote, that Mitt Romney—when asked, long before Sandy, who was his favorite pop culture icon (between Snooki and Honey Boo Boo)—claimed that he really liked Snooki (“so energetic”), making it seem as if he were a regular, Jersey Shore-watching guy.
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I’m serious. Has there ever been a more transparent and contemptible lie? Sure, it’s a minor point. But it’s contemptible because it displays (like the 47 percent line) Romney’s contempt for the “little people.” Throw them a name from their vulgar culture and they’ll eat it up on the food-stamp lines.
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He thinks ordinary people are so stupid they’d actually believe he and his wife and maybe his “dancing horse” (as Snoop Dogg, among others, memorably called the steed) sit down together to watch Snooki and the Sitch. Give me an effen’ break.
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The nature of this inauthenticity, this shallowness, is so deep it’s almost fathomless. Couple that with another forgotten pre-Sandy campaign controversy: Does Romney use self-tanner, as this Jezebel roundup suggests? Or is it just “full makeup,” as this Times story euphemizes?
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I don’t begrudge Snooki her self-tanning. But a presidential candidate who needs to be so heavily made up can be said to be, on some fundamental or at least metaphorical level, “made up.”
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And I think that’s where Bruce’s championing of Obama comes in.
For just enough of those voters, the doubting ones, the election of the president became a choice not between Obama and Romney but between Bruce and Romney. You know who won.

Several more days are then devoted to analyzing what it all meant. Some exit polls show that 40 percent of voters felt that Obama’s hurricane response—or what they saw of it—was an important factor in their vote.
This, by the way, is the Chris Christie who claims to have attended 100 Bruce Springsteen concerts (which is a little sad you have to admit—it’s true I have mixed feelings about the fat guv). He’s an emotional guy whose sense of urgency about the plight his coast faced must have been shot through, somehow, with a Springsteenian sense of the perilous beauty and tragic aura of the devastated boardwalk towns. And then we learn that Obama got Bruce Springsteen—who’d previously been standoffish with the GOP gov—to call Chris Christie from Air Force One. After which a jubilant Christie confessed that when Bruce had hugged him during a brief meeting at a Sandy telethon—before Bruce went back on the road with Obama—Christie had gone home and wept! Bruce was Chris Christie’s Sandy. (Which must have led to more teeth-grinding at Romney HQ: What was Bruce doing on Air Force One?)

((slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/the_spectator/2012/11/bruce_springsteen_elected_barack_obama_the_strange_confluence_of_sandy_snooki.html))
How Bruce Springsteen Elected Barack Obama
Sandy, Snooki, Christie, Bruce, and Barack.
By Ron Rosenbaum | Posted Friday, Nov. 9, 2012
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Sandy—the elusive, iconic Jersey girl—appears on Bruce’s album, The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle. “Fourth of July …” is a song that evokes in a strained but heartfelt way the poignant and seamy, the doomed wild and innocent romanticism of the old Jersey shore.
If you listen—it doesn’t quite come across in cold type—you can hear the beautiful desperation that would run throughout Springsteen’s best work:
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Sandy (the song) has even got a dangerous fortune teller on its boardwalk:
“Did you hear the cops finally busted Madame Marie for tellin’ fortunes better than they do?” (A prefiguration of Nate Silver?)

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Rosenbaum is probably my generation. That was my coming of age era and so those first three albums were imprinted on me forever. Yeah, even/especially the verbose Dylanesque first two. By the time the later ones came around I was too distracted by all the usual to pay as much attention. Funny thing is, 2 decades later one of my doctoral students in Oxford was a big Bruce fan but was surprised when — in response to him playing the 80s works over and over — I played those early albums on our lab ghetto blaster (Well, Wild & Innocent; everyone knows Born to Run).

And track record should then be a key determinant of whether we should bother listening to them next time.

I imagine The Donald’s response would be “Why Hawaii? He’s never been there!!”

These are buoyant times, Mr Rundle, relish every minute. And remember not to dehydrate.

“We hope our candidate will win, but mathematical polling shows X,” would have been much more honest.