On Thursday night’s Anderson Cooper 360 on CNN, you could watch two Reagan aides serve up buckets of doom and gloom. While David Gergen called the mood on the trail “incendiary” and possibly headed toward violence (read too much Dana Milbank after his fruit tart deficit?), soothsayer Ed Rollins announced Republican doom with great certainty, like he was hoping to cause several Republican volunteers to jump out of 12th story windows:

ANDERSON COOPER: Ed, let me start of with you. Do you believe this race is over for John McCain?
ED ROLLINS: I do. I mean, I’m for McCain; I’m going to vote for McCain. But the momentum has gone all the other way. And equally as important, you can’t break through with the economy being so overwhelming.
COOPER: So all this Bill Ayers stuff, even the bringing up Reverend Wright –
ROLLINS: No one cares about it anymore. If it was month ago or two months ago, people might have cared. Today, they don’t care. Barack has met the threshold where people think he’s going to be a leader. He’s tied McCain to the past and Bush and I think people clearly want to make a move. It’s like Carter. When David and I were involved with Reagan in 1980, people — once Reagan met the threshold, people clearly wanted to get rid of Carter and they did in the landslide. This is going to turn into a landslide…
The other fundamental question here is, how do you want to end your career, if John McCain ends his career? We’re now starting to lose — the potential is there to not only lose the Senate, but to lose the Senate leader, the Republican leader, to lose someone like Elizabeth Dole. We could lose 10 Senate seats. We could lose 25 House seats.
DAVID GERGEN: Wow. Do you really think 10? That’s the biggest number I have heard.
ROLLINS: There’s 12 of them in play. And I went through the list today. And it’s — it’s — the floor is dropping. And, so, all of a sudden, he needs to help his party. He’s the leader of his party.
COOPER: So, how does he do that?
ROLLINS: Well, you do that by talking — you have to go give an alternative on the economy. He has got to be prepared this week to go out and really have a good, strong — talk about economic leadership, so that his party has a little bit of something to run on.
COOPER: But it’s interesting. You see that crowd. And he says, look, but I also want to — they talk about Ayers a little bit. He said, but I also want to give a positive message on the economy. It didn’t seem like the crowd wanted to hear that.
ROLLINS: You don’t give them a choice. They’re there to — you don’t want the crowd to get angry at this point in time. And the truth of the matter, he — if he brings this party down, I mean, forever, his legacy will be that they lost 10 or 12 seats, 25 seats in the House, and he will give Barack everything he needs to basically move an agenda.

Is this the most reliable way to be a Republican who gets booked repeatedly on CNN? Imagine what the GOP happy-news talking points would be, and then say the exact opposite? It does remind me that even on election nights, like 1996, or the early exit polls in 2004, suggested great Republican doom too early. Why can’t networks like CNN wait four weeks before asking if a race is “over”?