It’s human to want to make predictions about the future, but at this point, I really have no idea whether Obama will be reelected next year. Sometimes I think he will, and sometimes I think he won’t.

And I wasn’t too worried about the Republicans until Rick Perry entered the race.

Mitt Romney? On the one hand, I think Romney is beatable in the general election. He’s like the Republicans’ John Kerry. On the other hand, if Romney did become president, I don’t think he’d be as much of a disaster as some of the other Republicans, because I don’t think deep down he’s as conservative as some of the others. (And yet, any Republican president will be beholden to the crazy Republican base and will be inevitably pulled rightward. Still, at least there’d be a chance of less insane policies from him than from most other Republican candidates.)

Michelle Bachmann? I can’t really see her getting the nomination. She’s a general election loser, and I think enough people would come out in the primaries to stop her.

But Rick Perry? I can certainly see him winning the nomination. And while part of me thinks the American people will not elect another idiotic fundamentalist Christian Republican Texas governor so soon after the last one, another part of me has zero faith in the intelligence or memory of the American people.

I mean, cripes, tons of people out there still don’t understand that raising the debt ceiling was NOT ABOUT NEW SPENDING, it was about paying back what we borrowed for already-approved spending. Which I think speaks to an enormous media failure. As great as it was to see David Gregory relentlessly press Michele Bachmann on her anti-gay bigotry yesterday, he totally let it slide when she lied about the debt ceiling.

I do have hope, though. One, the election is still more than a year away. Two, unlike one-term presidents Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush, Barack Obama is a damn good campaigner and debater.

Still, any predictions at this point would be fruitless.