I also take great pride in being a rational man. I'm a man of reason who values hard data and a dispassionate evaluation of facts. But I also have intuitions, and while I try to moderate them with facts and analyses, I  have them nonetheless - and my intuitions, I confess, sometimes keep me awake at night. What are they telling me?

The United States faces uncertain times. Several things concern me.

First: How in the world can this presidential election be this close, at least according to the polls? We have a former president who, while not without his flaws (and who among us lacks those?), had a largely successful first term, with lower inflation, manufacturing starting to move back on-shore, the military rebuilding, and the economy humming along. He was displaced by a befuddled incompetent who barely left his basement and now seeks a second term against - I will be very blunt here - a cackling imbecile. Are the polls that badly wrong? At least one analyst thinks they may be. Craig Keshishian was a pollster in the Reagan era, and he has some thoughts:

I believe there is a shift underway that the polls have not yet picked up on.

Even as a polling analyst, I must admit that the forecasting power of public opinion surveys in America is limited. Polls can be flawed through chance, incompetence or even deception.

There's another 'metric' that I've found useful – and it's based on 40 years of experience measuring the attitudes of the American people and getting a feel of what they really think.

And it's starting to 'feel' like 1980 all over again.

We can hope. But it's still troubling. This should be an election when, if the entire voting public was looking coldly, analytically at the facts, the GOP ticket should have a much more comfortable advantage. Granted, both sides are giving it their best shot - it's just that, this season in particular, the GOP is putting more points up on the board. And yet things still seem too close for comfort. The polls may be badly wrong. This may be another 1980. I hope so. But I suspect - my gut talking - it will be a close-run thing.

See Related: Democrat Voter Hits the Trifecta: Trump-Hater, Transgender, Threat-Maker

Check Out This Fake Photo of Kamala Harris Working at McDonald's Being Shared on Social Media

New Revelations From IRS Whistleblowers in First Interview Since Hunter Biden's Guilty Plea

And speaking of what the Democrats are putting out, which is mostly of the sort you'd find underneath the south end of a northbound bull, why do so many buy it? Well, I'm inclined to believe that our education establishment is largely to blame for that. Oh, kids from K-12 through university today are all too often being taught about pronouns (and I don't mean in the sense that they are being taught the parts of speech) and climate change instead of reading, writing, and history. How many people under the age of 50 today could tell you who first calculated the circumference of the Earth? (Eratosthenes of Cyrene, over two thousand years ago.) How many young people today know what the Federalist Papers are, and why they matter to our American system of government? How many people know who comprised the first and second Roman Triumvirates, and what happened between them? 

The schools aren't teaching these things. Hell, they aren't even teaching kids how to diagram a sentence - I had to teach my kids how to do that, and more importantly, why they should know how to do it - and they went to school in the '90s and '00s. 

Here's what troubles me the most: What happens moving forward? A nation has a lot of ruin in it. I'm 63, though, and the United States today is a very different place than it was when I graduated high school in 1980. In some ways it's better; the Information Revolution has changed almost every aspect of our lives, from shopping to working to socializing to being entertained; it even allows me to do what I do from a small office in the Susitna Valley, instead of requiring me to occupy a desk in some big-city publication. But the country seems unbearably polarized. One of our current presidential candidates has been the object of not one, but two assassination attempts. Is this the new normal? Are we to see knives on the Senate floor next? What happens in 2028, and 2032? Will nutjobs be taking shots at JD Vance, at Ron DeSantis, at Tulsi Gabbard?

What can we do to turn this around? Well, fixing the education system would be a hell of a great start; the purpose of education is to produce young adults with marketable skills, but some grounding in history and culture would be good too - and by culture I mean Western civilization and capitalism, both systems that have produced more and longer-lasting peace and prosperity than any other governing or cultural system in the history of mankind. To do that, the best way I can think of is to get the government completely out of education at any level above county (or borough, in our case) school boards, if even that. Let a thousand flowers bloom. This won't be without its flaws, either, but while freedom may not always be free, it is also frequently messy. If parents in San Francisco want to send their little tads to the "Gertrude Stein Academy for the Terminally Woke," more power to them; if parents in, say, Fort Worth would prefer to send their kids to the "Elon Musk School of Entrepreneurship and Engineering" they should likewise be free to do so. Let the cream rise to the top, and at least in this system, we can be assured that there will be some cream.

My Dad (born 1923) always said that he and Mom (born 1928) were lucky in that they, children of the Great Depression and young adults during World War 2, nevertheless saw America's best years. I'm hoping he's wrong. I'm afraid he's not. 

We can still turn this around. We can start next Tuesday. Let's get it done.