There’s a two in five chance that Mitt Romney will be president eight months from now

Per Intrade, which is probably the most reliable measure of that question at this point.

And of course if Romney is elected president there’s a good chance both houses of Congress will be in GOP hands, since these probabilities are interdependent to a significant extent.

Hard as it may be to summon much enthusiasm for electing the Diversity!(TM) version of Nelson Rockefeller president again, the alternative, which for complex psychological reasons many progressives have been treating as a practical impossibility, is worth contemplating with some attention, for the same reason Dr. Johnson advocated the contemplation of the hangman’s rope.