You don't know what you think you know

As the primary season comes to a close, there's an important lesson that we shouldn't let slip by. And that lesson is, don't assume you know everything before the races even start.

• As early as mid-2006, Hillary Clinton was anointed as the obvious presumptive nominee by the punditocracy. None other than Joe Scarborough said that anyone who crossed the Clinton's would be "crushed into dust", and compared Obama to the Brady bunch creation, Johnny Bravo (not the cooler Johnny Bravo)
• Remember Rudy Giuliani? He was supposed to breeze through the primaries and make the case that his leadership skills would make him the clear choice to be the republican nominee. Unfortunately for him, he came down with a severe case of 9/11 Tourette's.
• John McCain was all but given up for dead after his embarrassing trip to Iraq, where he said everything was perfect there, and proved it by walking through a street market...wearing a protective jacket and a helmet.
• Mitt Romney was supposed to be the sensible conservative's choice, Mike Huckabee was going to pull in all the evangelicals, John Edwards was the kind of guy that could bring the Democrats the south, Mike Gravel...ok he was batshit crazy, so that one was right.

We should have learned after the last election, where Joe Lieberman was considered to be the front runner at the beginning of 2003, and by the end of the year Howard Dean couldn't be stopped. Let's try and keep that in mind before we start getting out over our skis in 2016.