Somewhere Between Vindication And Despair
This will be my last election post, I promise. After this we can go back to Paris Hilton jokes and making fun of my kids.

It's been a full 24 hours since the official concession and I've had some time to reflect. I've come to the conclusion that it's not the end of the world. Of course I mean that in the metaphorical sense in reference to Democratic politics. Whether or not a second Bush administration will oversee the actual end of the world is more up in the air. I'd put it at about 40/60.

Not saying which is 40 and which is 60.

Some more detail has been released abuot the exit poll numbers. Breaking it down by deciding issue, the now-infamous "morality" people ranked first in terms of numbers and they went almost exclusively for Bush. For some reason the article doesn't break down the Terrorism deciders, but let's assume they went for Bush too.

Those for whom the economy was first priority went for Kerry huge, as did those who cited the Iraq war.

So the conclusion I guess is that Kerry was right on Iraq and the economy, but still he got swamped. He ran exactly the campaign he wanted to run and rolled with the issues he made the centerpieces of his campaign, Iraq and the economy.

The problem was that at the exact same time there was this totally separate second election going on that Kerry was completely oblivious to. It was the "Which one of us is George W. Bush again?" election. Apparently it was all the rage in the Red States. Even had Kerry known about it, I really don't like his chances in that contest.

See, one of them is a New England-born blue-blood, prep school-attending Yale graduate and the other was... oh wait a second. Maybe he had a better shot than I realize.

I guess the real separation in this campaign wasn't the choice of Edwards as vice president or any of the debates or the Osama bin Laden video or even that Ashlee Simpson Saturday Night Live thing (though we'd be fools to discount it entirely).

No, the turning point in this campaign was when George Bush's mom and dad decided to take their giant pile of old family money and move it to Texas. There little George W was still young enough that he could still absorb that accent (they all say the word "terror" as "terr" down there) and affect that squinty face as well as the now famous bowlegged gait that screams West Texas.

West Texas or Day After My First Night With My New Cellmate. One or the other.

From there it didn't matter if he spent the next 30 years of his life in a Wild Turkey haze and trading in on his dad's name to insinuate himself into West Texas business only to fail spectacularly at everything he tried (including, I would argue, the presidency).

All that mattered in 2004 Red State America were the accent, the swagger and millions of terrified white people.

Oh, and the opponent. What a gift that was. As if you needed any more proof that God exists and He (inexplicably) loves loves loves George W. Bush.

So both sides ran exactly the campaigns they wanted. There's alot of gloom and doom talk amongst Democrats, but if you look at the 2004 electoral map vs. the 2000 electoral map, you're going to see that not much has changed. Sure, the anomalous bump in turnout among The Faithful swayed alot of local and state races and turned some southern Democratic Senate seats (Georgia, Louisiana) to the other side and boosted Bush's national vote tally, but what was true on Monday is still true today:

No northern Democrat has won the presidency since John F. Kennedy in 1960. Carter (Georgia) in 1976 and Clinton (The Bosom Of The Angels) in '92 and '96. That's it. Kerry is Dukakis is Mondale is McGovern, except he actually did better than those others, though not as well as the Southern-ish Gore (though he did get more total votes and even if the end result was the same).

It's not the end of the world.

Yet.


This post on the Narcissus Scale: 9.0


Pops

- posted by Pops @ 9:09 AM