Hypothetically speaking, if the over-under had been set at 5 1/2 and a concertgoer had taken the under, he would have lost, decisively, even before Mr. Wonder finally sang "Superstition" (accompanied, naturally, by Pat Monahan from the soft-rock band Train).
"Without these states' 112 electoral votes," the Cook Political Report writes, "Obama would have lost decisively".
Frank Rich seems downright gleeful at the "too perfect" circumstances wherein William Bennett has "lost all his culture wars as decisively as he lost his $8 million" -- as delighted, apparently, as Tupac Shakur would be if he were still alive.
Players come and go with a shrug; there is a growing appreciation now that whatever the personnel, the manager has lost the ability to prepare them in any way that could decisively alter the trajectory.
Not all of them are from Texas but, even if they were, that would amount to roughly less than half of 1% of the state's total population or, to put it another way, roughly 1/28 as many Texans as voted for Mr Obama (he may have lost Texas decisively, but he still won more votes there than he did in Illinois, Pennsylvania or Massachusetts).
Mr. Obama had lost the state decisively to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York in the Democratic primary.
But assuming he is a regular reader of The Independent, I offer him the following thoughts which he is welcome to print out or transcribe into a notebook of the sort that Vasek Pospisil, his opponent in the quarter-final, kept by his chair and from time to time consulted – without success, admittedly, but we don't know how much more decisively he'd have lost without it.
In 1501 Bābur was decisively defeated at Sar-e Pol and within three years had lost both Samarkand and his principality of Fergana.
Still, one can see how listeners who prefer decisively clear structures might find this symphony intolerably amorphous: the listeners who left may simply have lost patience with its often slow-moving clouds of string and brass coloration.
Which brings me to the third reason the deficit scolds have lost influence: the contrary doctrine, the claim that we need to practice fiscal austerity even in a depressed economy, has failed decisively in practice.
