No, not the expectations game about tonight’s debate– the bigger game. You know, the election expectations game.

The reason that all of September’s contradictory, GOP-weighted, dismaying, and/or downright useless polls matter, in the end, is that they’ve helped to give Republicans a sense that this one is already in the bag. And the reason that’s important should be obvious: four years ago, these people were convinced– partly by pre-election polls, partly by their own overwhelming sense of entitlement– that Bush was the rightful winner in Florida, and that Gore tried to steal the election. That’s why they fought in Florida with such passion. That’s why they rioted in Miami-Dade to stop the recount. That’s why they massed around the Vice-Presidential residence, chanting for Gore to “get out of Cheney’s house.” They truly believed that they played fair and square in 2000, and that Democrats– together with the liberal media, which called Florida for Bush ten minutes before the polls closed and thereby suppressed untold millions of possible Bush votes– manipulated the post-election numbers with their characteristic Democrat ruthlessness and cynicism.

And that’s the country we live in: George Bush’s frigging first cousin calls the election on Fox, in a state governed by his brother, and next thing you know, Billy Tauzin (R- La.) is demanding an investigation of the Florida results– in order to find out why the networks made their original call for Gore!

“Oh, come off it, Michael,” a hypothetical interlocutor might say, if he or she were to sound exactly like any number of actual people I’ve spoken to over the past four years. “The AM-radio wingnuts might say all that crap about Democrats stealing elections, and yeah, Hugh Hewitt might write an entire book about it, but surely they don’t really believe it. Can’t you recognize wingnut projection when you see it? At some level they must know what they’re doing.”

Well, don’t talk to me about wingnuts, all you hypothetical interlocutors. Remember, I was one of them for four consecutive days not too long ago. I know the Borg– I know how it thinks! And I assure you that, counterintuitive though it may be to your human minds, the Borg thinks it’s being persecuted, marginalized, and just plain robbed by you sneaky, underhanded liberals!

And that’s why, if Jeffrey Rosen is right (the link here is to Digby’s terrific post on Rosen’s TNR essay, which is subscription-only), we need to think ahead to what we’ll be facing if the nightmare post-Bush v. Gore scenario comes to pass:

in response to the legalization of politics that has followed Bush v. Gore, Democratic and Republican legal swat teams have been assembled to challenge the results of the 2004 presidential election if the vote in any state proves close enough to provide the margin of victory in the electoral college. And, even if the presidential election is not close, Bush v. Gore will continue to haunt congressional and local elections in November and beyond. “You could have dozens or even hundreds of cases filed on the Wednesday morning after the election,” says Jack Goldsmith of Harvard Law School. “Given the litigation opportunities in Bush v. Gore, you could have real, real uncertainty for many weeks and months, not only about national elections but about local elections. And it’s likely to get worse.”

As Digby says, “If this came from anyone but Rosen I would think it was another of those Greenfield-esque parlor games in which they sit around on CNN for hours at a time in stultifying discussion of bizarre election scenarios that will never happen. But we’d be fools to ignore the fact that Bush vs Gore is a cancer that has the potential to metastisize very rapidly if this election is as close as we expect it to be.”

Digby’s right (of course he’s right– didn’t the sun come up today?), but I want to call your attention to that last little bit about the election being “as close as we expect it to be.” I have the funny feeling that only “we” (that is, Kerry voters) expect it to be close. The Bush junta is already going into its inevitability routine again, and we can expect to see repeats of 2000’s Karl Rove Campaign Follies, like having Bush campaign in California and New Jersey in anticipation of his inevitable landslide. Surely the day cannot be far off when Judy Woodruff predicts that Bush will pick up 400 electoral votes.

Now, under these conditions, can you imagine the kind of spittle-flecked frenzy with which Republicans will respond to ambiguous election results in, say, Ohio, Wisconsin, or Florida? Even before the first challenge is filed (and remember, in Florida, they sued– and then screamed nonstop at us for dragging the election into the courts), those wacky GOP operatives and their media shills will be all over us, charging us with fraud and election-tampering simply because they believe their own pre-election spin. And they’ll be even angrier this time than in 2000, because . . . uh . . . because . . . because of all the things John Kerry has done to show how much he hates America, that’s why! (See Miller, Zell, “Keynote Address to the Republican National Convention Followed by Duel with Chris Matthews,” Irrational Rancor Quarterly 65.3 (2004).)

Are we Democrats really ready for that fight? We should be.