John McCain will be the next president.

Cut this out and display it on your refrigerator door. Be sure to include my by-line.

If McCain wins, send it to all your friends, and maybe to the New York Times, Washington Post and CNN.

If Barack Obama wins, forget I said it.

The prediction has nothing to do with the relative merits of the candidates, or with who has the best-looking running mate (Hey, you give Joe Biden a $150,000 wardrobe allowance and he’ll look as good as Brad Pitt).

It has to do with my ambition to become one of the media elite, with an op-ed column in the New York Times or the Washington Post or maybe a show of my own on CNN.

You can’t get there without writing something awesome and, let’s face it, I have written nothing awesome lately in the snooty eyes of those opinion arbiters.

But calling a McCain upset accurately would be like picking Louisiana-Monroe to defeat the Crimson Tide at Bryant-Denny, or picking the Tampa Bay Rays back in April to win the American League Pennant, or picking Vanderbilt to finish ahead of the Tennessee Volunteers in the SEC. Picking Barack Obama is sort of like betting on Big Brown in the Belmont Stakes: victory is a foregone conclusion.

McCain is a long shot, I know, but if the prediction is off a tad and Obama wins, nobody will remember. If it’s on target, I go straight to the top of the prognosticating heap and maybe will be invited to join the best election team on television as a consultant.

There is a sound rationale behind the prediction. More than 50 years in journalism has taught me instinctively to get suspicious any time all the facts and all the opinion seem to be pointing in one direction. And this time, everything seems to point to a Democratic sweep.

I’ve been watching CNN as it nightly parades before its TV audience an array of political experts across the spectrum. On the far left, Roland Martin, the talk show host, gleefully points out all the reasons nobody wants a Republican for president. Paul Begala, a Democratic strategist, concurs that it sure looks like the Democrats have a lock on it. Alex Castellanos, who advised Mitt Romney in his campaign for the Republican nomination, seems almost chipper as he acknowledges that the odds favor Obama. David Gergen, the adviser to presidents from both parties, explains why McCain will probably lose, even as he injects enough sympathy into his sensible comments to preserve his neutrality.

News leaks out that there’s a rift between John McCain’s people and Sarah Palin’s people because Sarah insists on doing things her way. Begala says it’s classic Republican behavior: When a campaign is going down the tubes they pull out the knives. When a Democratic campaign starts foundering, they all go into a yurt and smoke pot.

Castellanos explains that when the lights go out, you’d better drop to the floor because some shots are going to be fired. He appeared to be saying that the lights had gone out in the McCain campaign.

And there’s CNN’s John King with his magic map, able to transform states from red to blue with a touch of the finger — able to do everything but pronounce “electoral” correctly (it’s e-LEC-to-ral, not e-lec-TOR-al).

William Kristol, the New York Times’ man on the right, is among the more optimistic of McCain supporters. He compares McCain to French Marshal Ferdinand Foch, who described his situation at the Marne in World War I: ‘My center is giving way; my right is in retreat. Situation excellent: I attack.” Foch won.

Kristol wants McCain to finish the campaign on the attack, with emphasis on the commander-in-chief thing (I thought that had already been tried).

“Would this turn things around?” he asked rhetorically. “Unlikely. But why not take a shot?”

So there you have it. Opinion is unanimous everywhere except, maybe, at Fox News: McCain ain’t gonna make it.

King looks confidently at his e-lec-TOR-al map and tries to see a scenario for a McCain win, which is, roughly, to run the table on the battleground states and take Pennsylvania away from the Democrats.

Let me venture a half-dozen possible avenues to a McCain victory:

(1) George Bush comes out with a surefire free-market solution to the economic crisis and gives McCain full credit for inspiring it.

(2) Sarah Palin proposes a thoughtful solution to the health-care problems that will leave every American covered with medical insurance without busting the budget or taking away the patient’s right to choose health-care providers.

(3) Rush Limbaugh produces a birth certificate proving that Barack Obama is the son of Osama bin Laden.

(4) Bill Ayers issues a statement crediting Obama with inspiring his incendiary tactics during the anti-Vietnam fervor of the ’60s and vowing to continue promoting these tactics.

(5) McCain promises to make Joe the Plumber his secretary of labor.

(6) The American public, watching Obama commandeer the media with his last-minute spending surge, decides it likes the underdog.

The last is far more likely to happen than any of the other scenarios. If it works, the New York Times, the Washington Post and CNN can read the shirttail at the bottom of this column and learn how to reach me.

If it doesn’t, they can go fly a kite. Being a columnist for the Fairhope Courier is rewarding enough for me.

Readers may write Gene Owens at 317 Braeburn Drive, Anderson SC 29621 or e-mail him at WadesDixieco@AOL.com