PLEASE DON'T THINK LIKE THIS

People from deep-blue (and deep-red) states, please don't think like Gail Collins:

...Here we are just a little more than a week away from one of the most important elections in modern history, and most of us are beside the point, our states long since written off as hopelessly red or blue.

This is the time of year when parents from New York to Alabama ask the experts: How old should my child be before I tell him that his vote doesn't count? Do I wait until she's in high school to break it to her that if she decides to plant her roots in California or Utah, her role in presidential elections will be less significant than her voice in deciding who should be eliminated in the next episode of "Dancing With the Stars"? ...

Listen to me: every vote counts. Read Peggy Noonan's column from Friday and you see why:

...The RealClearPolitics average of national polls as I write, rounded off, is Obama 50%, McCain 43%. Actually Mr. Obama has 50.1%, and if that is true and holds, it would make him the first Democratic presidential nominee since Jimmy Carter to break 50%. But I find myself thinking of what that 43% means. It's a big number, considering that this is the worst Republican year in generations. Amid two wars, a deep economic crisis, a fractured base, too much cynicism, and a campaign with the wind not at its back but head on in its face -- with all of that working against Mr. McCain, 43% of the American people say, right now, in these polls, they are for him.... Forty-three percent of 122 million is 52 million people, more or less....

There are too damn many polls showing Obama with a double-digit lead, as far as I'm concerned -- if he wins the popular votes by six points or fewer, especially a lot fewer, too many of the chatterers are going to talk as if he actually lost, as if he underperformed when he had everything going his way, that he didn't really "close the sale," that he squeaked by. They'll suggest that McCain-Palin and McCain-Palinism were what voters really wanted, and would have voted for if that pesky Bush guy weren't making McCain and Palin look like something they really, really aren't, i.e., Bush Republicans. Or they'll say that McCain minus Bush and Palin would have won, so McCain was kinda-sorta the people's choice.

Obama needs every vote he can get, in every state. Every vote helps reduce the possibility that he'll be seen this way, and seen as lacking a "mandate" (and yes, I know perfectly well that this wasn't a problem for W after 2000 election, but, of course, there's your double standard).

So -- not that I need to tell you this -- but vote for Obama, dammit. Vote for him in whatever state you're living in. It's important.