As If BP’s Not Enough, Now I’ve Got OCED Too

by Nathan Walpow

If you've been reading Bad Developments, and you're the type who stays on top of things, you might know that I'm in the throes of my second bout with Bell's palsy. (Gory details at the bottom of this page.) But I've been suffering from another malady too, and it appears it has a name: OCED. While that seems like it ought to be some version of the Oxford English Dictionary, it's actually Obsessive Compulsive Election Disorder, as explained by Barbara Dehn in this Huffington Post piece.

It's an extension of the behavior I described here, except now, besides electoral-vote.com, we've got fivethirtyeight.com and pollster.com and a whole bunch of other sites which, with varying degrees of success, crunch and munch the poll numbers into just about any shape you might want to consider them in.

I've been quietly optimistic this year. Hoping this country could turn things around, hoping the fearmongering of the past eight years could be replaced by something kinder and gentler, something more traditionally American, something that would present an atmosphere more conducive to, like we say on the masthead, fair living conditions for everyone.

Now it looks like my optimism is about to be rewarded, though I won't believe it until I wake up on November 5 and see the nation's come to its senses. Which kind of makes the OCED more fun. Because it's much cooler to wade through columns of figures that support what you want.

In the meantime ... I haven't checked 538 in, oh, twenty minutes. So I have to go ...

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