My electoral predictions are much better in the intermediate term, say from now to the 2012 election, than most people’s.

As I have complained many times before, no one ever checks out the predictions of expert predictors. So the “experts” consulted about what is going to happen can make all the totally screwed predictions they wish, so long as those predictions are popular at the time they are made.

ALL of our commentators get paid for CURRENT commentary.

The fact that “all the experts were wrong” is a repeated phrase makes not the slightest difference. Regardless of their track record, we keep the same “predictors.”

One reason I was able to foresee so many outcomes was my ignorance of the Latest Thing. When speaking of elections, for example, you are dealing with a result that will be the outcome of choices of real voters, and real voters have the same ignorance gap that I do.

Why is this information produced?

Columnists submit their columns and those columns are printed according to the newspapers’ needs RIGHT NOW. You predict whatever seems to be wise at this moment. Nobody will notice it a year from now.

So politicians, right and left, keep on the good side of Mommy Professor’s Press Corps until the election is breathing down their necks.

Senator William Fulbright was a favorite of the press corps for five and a half years out of his six-year term. But as his reelection came due, he was literally in his overalls out in Arkansas right up to the November polling.

A reporter asked Fulbright what one must do to be a Great Senator, flattering him by reminding him that he was a favorite Great Senator to the press corps as a solid liberal five and a half out of each six years.

Clearly remembering the media’s attitude to the other six months, Fulbright replied, “First, you’ve got to be a Senator.”

Back about 1960 it was a standard brag on the part of the sophisticated that “I never watch television.”

Being culturally out of touch with the Lowah Classes was always highly fashionable among the self-styled Intellectuals who, at the same time, loudly proclaimed their Solidarity With the Working class.

Then a politician said he had never heard of Elvis. This was about 1960! It was simply what would later be known as an Inside the Beltway comment, showing that a conservative politico fit in among the “I don’t watch television as the peasants do” Uppah Clahss.

It backfired big time. You’ve heard of “I was country when country wasn’t cool.” This was Elvis when Elvis wasn’t cool. He wasn’t really cool with the “I don’t watch television” crowd until he died.

But even back then, people smelled something wrong with an elected representative who was so out of touch he had never heard of Elvis.

He ended up writing a letter to young Elvis.