Today’s blog is short, if not sweet—and will mention a couple of campaign tidbits, starting with Larry J. Sabato. Larry is a dynamic and prolific University of Virginia political science professor immensely popular with students (and with many journalists, who appreciate his willingness to speak in English instead of in academese.) Although Sabato is not at all ideological—another rarity in college faculty lounges—he has been confidently predicting for months that the 2008 election shapes up as a Democratic rout of Republicans. With five days to go, he’s surer than ever.

Sabato shares his crystal ball on a blog called…Crystal Ball. His predictions for the White House, the congressional races, the governorships, are all here. I’ll spare you any suspense, though. He’s calling the presidential race over, decisively, with Barack Obama winning in the Electoral College with 364 votes to John McCain’s 174.

Meanwhile, looking ahead to 2012, loyal readers of Loose Cannon know of my dismay over the lopsided nature of the media’s coverage of the Republican Party's current vice presidential nominee, and (perhaps) future star. An outfit called the Culture and Media Institute has produced a study of the network coverage of Sarah Palin. CMI is a conservative group, no doubt about it, but their examination is worth reading (and can be found here). Governor Palin came out of the Republican convention in St. Paul with a 59 percent approval rating. That number is now about 44 percent. Could the networks' treatment of Palin be a big part of the reason? I think so. The rejoinder from the media’s defenders is that Palin revealed herself, most especially in less-than-stellar interviews with ABC’s Charles Gibson and CBS’s Katie Couric. That’s part of it, to be sure, but the CMI study shows how all three network news divisions only showed Palin to disadvantage, refusing to quote her when she said something intriguing, prefacing stories on her with prejorative characterizations, and routinely splicing their pieces with Tina Fey’s devastating send-up of Palin.

The number of positive network news reports about Palin in the two week period of the survey? Two. Negative pieces: 39. (Another 30 were rated as neutral.) By the way, it’s instructive to remember why Palin gave Gibson and Couric those interviews in the first place: Because the news media was beating up the McCain campaign for not making her available. If you want to win a bar bet this weekend, ask a Democratic friend when Joe Biden last held a news conference. You haven’t seen a lot of journalists stomping their feet about that, have you? (One exception is the sublimely talented Dana Milbank of The Washington Post. Check out his recent column about Biden, headlined, "The Quiet Man.")

Oh yes, the answer to the question about the Democratic vice presidential nominee's most recent press conference: The date was September 7. Yes, "Smokin’ Joe" Biden is on the verge of going the last two months of the 2008 campaign without taking a question from the Fourth Estate, which doesn't seem to care.