What a year! I made a $20 bet in July that if gas prices didn’t stop rising and hit $4.00 a gallon, Obama would win.  I figured the oil industry would insure a McCain victory by increasing production so that prices would peak at $3.99 or less.  Of course, this turned out to be incorrect. Gas never hit $ 4.00 a gallon during the summer, and Obama still won. The timing of the economic meltdown was the ‘’wild card’’ factor. For more than a decade, Noam Chomsky and Jello Biafra had been predicting an imminent global economic depression. (This was prior to the widespread international use of default credit swap slips or the massive U.S. deficit fueled by war spending and tax cuts.)