Category: Politics

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

This is truly shocking:

Tom Daschle has taken his Republican opponent to court over the intimidation of Indian voters via aggressive eye-rolling.

Via Begging to Differ.

This is very nice:

Overturning the orders of two federal judges, a three-judge panel of the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 early today that the presence of Election Day challengers was allowed under state law. It granted emergency stays that will allow Republicans and Democrats one challenger per precinct each.

So the Clinton judge who tried to re-write the Ohio constitution was slapped-down. Good.

I think the big question on this election day is how many fraudulent votes will be cast. By all appearances, the Democratic Party is hinging a lot of its final strategy on getting out the vote again, and again, and again. We’ve all heard the stories about the counties in Ohio where the number of registered voters exceeds the adult population and precincts in Philadelphia where voter registration exceeds the total population, about voter information packets returned in the tens of thousands marked “no such address” and “deceased”. Democrats are using the courts to block poll watchers from seeing voter IDs, claiming “minority harassment” and urging activists to allege intimidation where there is none.

Our voting system has next to no protection against large-scale fraud, and we can be sure the media aren’t going to back off their militantly pro-Kerry stance at the last minute and report this story accurately, so it’s likely that this election will be stolen if the actual vote is close. Some Democrat activists are already bragging about the magnitude of the fraud, putting it at two percent or higher. The only hope for election integrity this time around is large enough Republican turnout to thwart these tactics, and legislation over the next four years to prevent its happening again.

While I don’t like John Kerry and the campaign he’s run based on misinformation, flip-floppery, and disgusting personal attacks on the President, the Vice-President, and their families, the damage that he’ll do to the country with his coy policies is much less than the damage his party is going to do by destroying the integrity of our voting process. I don’t expect Democrats to wise up to this, however, because so many are still burning about the last election.

2000 seems like last week, and this campaign like it’s gone on forever. I hope when it’s over we can get at least a brief break from the campaigning and politicking for a little real life.

Powerline has the story on a Clinton judge’s Sunday night ruling enabling Democrats to steal Ohio. It’s on, folks: they’ll stop at nothing to steal this election.