Okay, listen to this

[mmcirvin]

1. The early leaks of exit polls had bad sampling biases; CNN's final exit polls are a lot closer to the returns, except maybe in Nevada and New Mexico. Sorry, that's the way I'm seeing it. Kerry/Edwards shouldn't concede until the absentees and provos are counted in Ohio, but I don't see them getting a miracle and I don't see any obvious sign that the election was stolen. Republicans ran a really good, if hateful, GOTV campaign in Ohio and Florida, and Bush got a clear lead in the national popular vote; in the likely event that he wins it'll be because he got more votes than the other guy. Unfortunately this means that any meaningful electoral reform is probably going to have to come from the bottom up.

2. Screw bipartisanship. Democrats in Congress, etc. should use every clear and legal mechanism in their power to obstruct further obnoxious Republican initiatives (and they are essentially all obnoxious), even benignly named ones, and remind the country that whatever happens over the next four years belongs to the GOP. The tea leaves tell me that, in the age of Nancy Pelosi, this is exactly what they will do. The votes to start another impeachment circus aren't there, but they really ought to push forward on Abu Ghraib; there's no moral middle ground there.

3. I know a bunch of Bush supporters. They're not bad people; in general they're not stupid people. I would like them to watch closely over the next four years and consider if this was what they really wanted.

4. Leave the country if you want, I'm not gonna.

Comments

[doctroid.livejournal.com]

1. Here I disagree: The best thing for the Dems to do right now is accept reality, concede Ohio, and get going on 2006. Acknowledging reality graciously can only make them look good -- and hey, if by some miracle of biblical proportions the final Ohio results were to favor Kerry, it's not like his concession would carry legal weight or anything. No matter what he does, if he were to win in the electoral college his loss in the popular vote would make his presidency look illegitimate to those of an anti-Kerry inclination. And anyway, no point in worrying about the down side of miracles.

2. Yeah. It's not as if bipartisanship is an option anyway. If there's one thing I loathe and revile about Bush more than anything else, it's that he took his minority in the popular vote and his razor-thin win of the electoral college as a mandate for an extreme shift of American policies toward the right wing. An honorable and humble man would've seen that the public endorsed neither one side nor the other, and would've reached out to the Democrats to build a bipartisan middle ground. He did the opposite. He sowed the division, let him reap it.

3. Is this what they really want right now? I haven't discussed things with Bush supporters much (I hardly know any) but I get the feeling it was more a support-the-president-and-hope-he-does-better kind of thing than any real admiration and endorsement on the part of many Bush voters.

4. Nor me. For now.

[manfire.livejournal.com]

Remember, there were also a lot of people who voted for Bush not because they thought he was great but because they disliked Kerry even more. A lot of people who fell into the "anybody but Bush" camp seem to have a hard time believing this, but it's true.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I don't think Kerry should drag a bid to contest the election out for months, given how the totals look now. Given the exit polls (the final ones, not the mid-afternoon returns), he wouldn't have a plausible case that rigged Diebold machines did it or anything like that.

But I don't think he should concede without at least the absentee count, either. It's the principle of the thing and a signal that we won't get rolled.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

White House just claimed that Kerry called to concede a few minutes ago. We'll know more later, I guess.