Attention Obamaniacs: Remain Calm!

In the space of just 10 days, many Democrats have decided that Barack Obama's once sure-fire candidacy is now doomed. Gail Collins has some advice for them: stop hyperventilating. If Team Obama seems as cool as always, says the New York Times columnist, it's because "they don’t care about national polls—a concept as quaint as measuring one’s wealth by caribou pelts."

Sarah Palin is dominating the news, though that's probably because she's "got that frontier aura that we’ve missed since all the cowboy television series were canceled a generation ago." Her advice to panicking Dems is to "just chill for a few weeks." Even if it seems like the election is soon, it's actually months away: "Time only seems short because these people have already been running for a year." (More Barack Obama stories.)