Barack Obama is the odds-on favorite to win the White House.

He already leads John McCain 52-41 in the latest Gallup Poll.

He’s smarter than McCain. He’s a much better speaker than McCain. He’s more inspiring than McCain.

And the conditions couldn’t be better for Obama—and all Democrats, for that matter.

The economy is going nowhere, with median incomes falling while gas and food prices are soaring.

Homes are being foreclosed upon unlike any time since the Great Depression.

The stock market isn’t making money for the middle class and upper middle class, whose 401(k) plans have been stagnant at best.

The war in Iraq is extremely unpopular.

Bush himself has approval ratings that are at historic lows—well below the freezing mark.

And a vast majority of Americans believe the country is heading off in the wrong direction.

So Obama should win, especially since he promises to bring record numbers of young people and African Americans to the polls.

But here’s why he might not.

First of all, he or someone close to him could make a big blunder. I don’t think this is likely, since he ran such a disciplined campaign, erring only a couple of times, most seriously with his San Francisco comment about guns and religion. But it could happen.

Second, Obama could do less well in the town hall debates than expected. After all, he lost about 18 of the 21 Democratic debates to Hillary Clinton or John Edwards.

Third, Obama’s cocaine use could cloud his chances. He himself admitted to using it in his first memoir, Dreams from My Father. How is the American public going to react to that?

Fourth, there’s the race factor. This one is hard to quantify because people don’t usually own up to their racism—especially to pollsters. But it’s out there, and it’s not insignificant. I was talking with some elderly white women in rural Wisconsin recently. And they told me they’d never not voted Democratic in their lives, but they’re voting for McCain this time. “But race has nothing to do with it,” they were too quick to tell me.

And fifth, what if Bush bombs Tehran on October 15 or thereabouts? I’d put the odds of that at about 50-50. What would that do to Obama’s chances? It could well be that McCain would stand to benefit from such a foreign policy crisis.

I keep hearing people say, “McCain can’t win.”

They’re kidding themselves.