to make the Obama version, and if McCain somehow wins, we’ re basically just totally screwed.” Likewise, Garry Trudeau gambled that Obama would win, and his syndicated Doonesbury strip--published the day after the election--depicted three soldiers in Iraq watching the returns on TV as a reporter is saying, “And it’ s official--Barack Obama has won.” Some editors were undecided about whether to publish it. Trudeau encouraged them to choose hope over fear. “If |’ m wrong,” he told the Los Angeles Times, “it' Il be my face that’ Il be covered with eggs, not theirs.” 7imes editors had decided, in the interest of accuracy, to wait for the election results, and if Obama won, they would publish the strip on Thursday, but then they must have realized it was just a comic strip, not investigative journalism, and they published it on Wednesday after all. Trudeau thought that newspapers should run the strip because “polling data gives McCain a 3.7% chance of victory.” Indeed, a week after Obama’ s win, McCain himself admitted to Jay Leno, “I can read the polls--they tried to keep ' em from me.” There were dozens of polls, from ABC to Zogby, and, psychographic sophistication aside, they didn’ t always exactly agree. For example, in Nevada during the last week of October, one poll put Obama’ s lead at 12%, another at 7%, another at 5% and two others at 4%, which meant that, given the margin of sampling HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_015321