Month: November 2004

Michael Barone is one of our most astute political analysts, and his take on the recently-concluded contest is excellent:

Love is stronger than hate.

There’s more.

The endless drooling about Jesusland and hacked voting machines is drowning out any discussion of the real trick used by the Evil Republicans to steal this election from the rightful candidate of the Good Hair Party, namely, psychic mind-control rays. Here’s a first-person account from a Sensitive:

Ok, I can understand the restlessness I’ve been feeling since yesterday. There’s a lot riding on this election, and passions are running high on both sides, so naturally eceryone and their naked brother who has an ounce of Power and no clue about Shielding is leaking energy like a hair dryer in a bathtub. So it’s Shields Up for me, but I’m still getting enough bleedover to make me jittery and a little manic if I don’t concentrate. That’s all to be expected.

What wasn’t expected was that once I filtered out all that background noise, I started hearing a calm, resonable, and powerful head-voice saying things like “Kerry doesn’t have the experience we need in these troubled times.” and “Give Bush a chance to make it better.”

Anyone who knows me KNOWS these are not my thoughts!

And besides, I voted last week. No, there’s no way in Hades these are my thoughts.

Gods-damn it! The f*cking Republicans have got Magical help pumping out a clear, unified, focused broadcast, and you can be sure, every sensitive is picking it up. These are the people most likely to vote Kerry, and I’d like to think they are resolute enough not to be swayed by telepathic subliminal advertising, but it’s such a rarely-done thing, and so few people are properly trained these days, that I fear it will be more effective. Just watch and see who says “I was going to vote for Kerry, but for some reason I changed my mind at the last minute.”

There you have it – and a tip of the tin-foil hat to Best O’ The Webs.

An anonymous buddy of Andrew Sullivan crunches the numbers and finds that the gay marriage bans didn’t drive up Bush support compared to comparable states without them:

It is certainly possible that the fact that the Bush administration raised the issue to the level to which did led to increased turnout among religious conservatives nationwide, which then resulted in Bush’s overall improved vote share over his 2000 performance. However, one would also expect that this vote share improvement would have been particularly high in states in which the marriage issue was particularly relevant. On the contrary, there is no evidence that suggests that the strategy of putting the anti-marriage initiatives on the ballot in several states did anything to improve Bush’s performance in those states.”

I suspected as much when I compared Ohio’s exit polls to Pennsylvania’s. Gay marriage is just not that big a deal for most people.

Frisco mayor Gavin Newsome is offended that some blogs are apparently blaming his decision to grant illegal marriage licenses to gays for the Kerry failure:

“Why aren’t the blogs talking about Schwarzenegger and his popularity at the convention? Why aren’t they talking about (the governor) going out to Ohio a couple days ago? Why aren’t they talking about the bin Laden tapes?

And Dianne Feinstein is blasted by gay rights groups for saying that the gay marriage issue was decisive in election results.

So the question here is what voters had in mind when they told those exit pollsters that “moral values” was their number one issue. Was it hating gays, or was it something more like integrity and honesty?

We’re seeing a lot of nastiness on the left already, where they essentially blame the voters for being too ignorant or too hateful to vote for Kerry. Excuse me, but doesn’t this sort of thing miss the point of elections? I mean, the people are what they are, and the politicians are supposed to win their support. Kerry failed to do that, despite 30 years of experience at that sort of thing, all the money he could possibly need, and an army of volunteers stretching from Canada to Mexico and Santa Monica to Manhattan. No, you can’t blame the voters.

Similarly, the Democrats who blame their alleged lack of organizational muscle are smoking Denial Brand Crack. With the unions, the Meetups, Moveon.org, Soros’ billions, Michael Whouley, their blogs, their mountain of books, magazines, and movies, you can’t fault the Kerry organization any more than you can fault the Dean organization for losing Iowa.

It really comes down to the same thing it always comes down to: the message. Kerry’s message, insofar as we were able to understand it, didn’t resonate outside the liberal enclaves in the big urban areas on the coasts and around the Great Lakes. Like the blogosphere, these population centers are vast echo chambers, insular, self-reinforcing, and self-referential.

Normal America wasn’t sold, and you can’t win elections without selling at least a part of it.

For the Democratic Party to stem their losses in the House and Senate come 2006 they’re going to have to get in touch with Normal America, and the first step is to stop the sneering, followed immediately by a cessation of the polarizing talk about “two Americas” and all that implies.

You’d think these damn people didn’t hear a word Barack Obama told them at their own convention; were they stoned?

This is not bad:

It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.

From Michael Totten at Instapundit:

A political party that thinks crying Halliburton! is a grown-up response to anti-totalitarian war just isn?t serious.

Amen.

Check the exit poll for your red-hot demographic breakdown. Some interesting finds: Bush won among white women, Catholics, and college grads, and made big gains among Hispanics, Blacks, and Jews, while Kerry held on among the unemployed, high-school dropouts, gays, and advanced degree holders.

I always have arguments about these categories with people who think they know politics, so this is my reference link.

The election is over and the President was re-elected by a much larger margin that any of the polls predicted. He won the popular vote by 51-48, a mandate, and he won the electoral college 286-252, a rather comfortable margin. He also won the moral victory by default, as Kerry/Edwards chose to play sore losers by refusing to concede defeat, and rubbed it in by not making a victory speech until Kerry concedes.

The President has a working majority in the Senate of 55-45, which is going to make it easier to peel off Democratic members to break filibusters, and he has Tom Daschle’s scalp as a reminder to Democratic senators who want to play the obstructionist game that this game has consequences. When Harry Reid replaces Daschle as Senate Minority Leader, the Democrats will have their first and only pro-life figure in a nationally prominent role, and Bush’s judges will have much less standing in their way than they’ve had for the last four years.

We now know that most of people in this country didn’t buy the extremist rhetoric about the illegitimacy and radicalism of the Bush Administration, and their judgment was harsh.

Democrats have much to learn from this election, starting with this: they can keep on acting like spoiled, bratty children and see their party recede ever farther into the fringe of American political life, or they can get in touch with their inner adult and take part in the dialog. It’s their choice to make, and while they’re mulling it over the country will proceed just fine without them.

Oh, and to those of you who’ve been claiming to be part of a “reality-based community” — actually, no, you aren’t.

Here are some election sites:

Yahoo News
CBS News
NY Times
Fox News
CNN
ABC News
MSNBC
Wash Post
Real Clear Politics