This week, to finish the cycle, I'll give you a pair of `08-reasons columns about Obama: Today, why he might lose Nov. 4. And Thursday, why he'll win. Am I hedging? No. I'm looking at the same polling data everyone else is but saying I can still see Republican John McCain pulling an upset. Why?

Then in January of 2007, just before he officially announced his candidacy, I published `08 reasons why Barack Obama will win the Democratic nomination.

In January 2005, just after Barack Obama was sworn in as a United States senator from Illinois, I published "` 08 reasons why Obama will run for president in 2008 .

1."Bittergate."

Obama has been remarkably disciplined in his campaign, but his one "oh, no, he didn't!?" moment was a doozy -- his unscripted comment in April that "it's not surprising [that residents of small-town America] get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them."

2.He's played too much defense.

Though Obama's campaign has run bazillions of ads criticizing McCain, they've stayed away from trying to raise questions about McCain's character and his judgment—questions the McCain campaign has been raising relentlessly about Obama and that Obama has had to answer. It's absurd, for instance, that more ink has been spilled about the judgment Obama showed in the 1990s when working on education reform with former Vietnam-era radical Bill Ayers than about McCain's judgment in 2002 and 2003 to cheerlead for the invasion of Iraq.

3.He was more dismissive than responsive to festering issues.

4.He left points on the table.

Most of you know about Obama's sleazy associate Tony Rezko. But how many of you know about McCain's sleazy associate Rick Renzi? McCain named Renzi, a retiring Republican congressman, a co-chair of his Arizona campaign in January, even though the Wall Street Journal and other publications had reported he was the subject of a federal corruption probe. Renzi was indicted in February and is facing trial. Yet the Obama campaign, apparently content to try to sit on this lead, hasn't made an issue of him or of McCain's friendship with convicted Watergate burglar G. Gordon Liddy, who once urged his radio listeners to "go for a head shot" if federal agents came to take their guns away.

5.Biden's blunder.

Yes, foreign evildoers tend to test new presidents. But when Obama's veepmate, Sen. Joe Biden, blathered on recently about an inevitable crisis in the first months of an Obama administration, it gave McCain a fat opening to highlight security concerns, one of his few winning issues, and play the fear card.

6.The economy now looks more like a chronic woe than an urgent crisis.

This has allowed McCain to settle into an anti-tax, anti-spend, anti-liberal campaign groove that often works for Republicans.

7. Smoke.

I've never seen a candidate subject to as many nutty rumors and guilt-by-association smears as those about Obama that land in my in-box every day. If enough voters decide in the end that there must be fire somewhere in all that noxious smoke, Obama's apparent lead will vanish.

8. He's African-American.

Let's be honest. In this rotten year for the Republican brand, if a white Democrat were sitting in the polls where Obama now sits, this "how he might lose" talk would be absurd.

It's not. But it is misleading. Join me Thursday and I'll tell you the 08 reasons why he'll win anyway.

UPDATE: Here's that list.