The future, foretold

I tooted my own horn earlier this month when I wrote about how I had correctly identified Barack Obama's greatest strength as a candidate way back in December 2006 -- that voters could "project their hopes and ambitions" onto his candidacy.

What I didn't realize until this week is that I predicted Obama's rise to power a full year earlier, in December 2005.

Well, not exactly. But get this:

In December of 2005, I did a post about stuff I expected to be really big in 2006. The third item on the list was a joke so subtle that no one got it. I picked Texas Rep. Matthew Santos as "a liberal with broad appeal," and said you should "look for him everywhere this fall."

Rep. Santos wasn't real, but the character played by Jimmy Smits on NBC's "The West Wing."

As it turns out, the fake Rep. Santos was modeled on the real Obama. Former West Wing writer Eli Attie says, "When I had to write, Obama was just appearing on the national scene. He had done a great speech at the (2004) convention and people were beginning to talk about him."

So there you go. In late 2005, I read the political landscape so well that I saw through NBC's subterfuge and correctly predicted the outcome of the 2008 presidential election.

Toot toot.