Okay, listen to this
Nov. 3rd, 2004 09:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mmcirvin1. 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.
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.
no subject
Date: 2004-11-03 10:37 pm (UTC)That, I think, has a lot to do with the quality of the opposition. Mondale was running against Reagan. Reagan was one of the two best communicators we've seen in the Oval Office in the last 40 years, was not bogged down in an ugly war, had a recovered/booming economy, and was perceived as being the One In Charge.
Bush II can't reliably get an unscripted sentence out of his mouth, has the ugly war, an economy that may or may not be recovering, and the perception that he's a puppet for rather selfish interests.
I've been a Republican as long as I've been anything. I remember celebrating Reagan's win over Carter as a 10-year-old. I despise Kerry as a person and on a policy level. I think his war record doesn't stand up very well (Bush's non-record doesn't impress me eithere, but that isn't the issue here, so don't go there), I can't get much of a sense of what he actually believes, his concept of how an economy works is significantly at variance with mine...and yesterday afternoon, I went down to my local polling place and voted for the miserable bastard.
This was not a vote for Kerry. It was a vote against Bush and against what he and his sort have done to my party. It was a vote for government deadlock and for changing which parts of the Constitution and society are under assault. It was a vote for hoping this was 1976 all over again and that we might get another Reagan in '08.
In short, it was not a vote for a new hardcore liberalism. I'm just one person, just one data point, and I don't know how widely shared my feelings are...but I'd be careful about making too many assumptions about the palatability of hardcore liberalism to moderate voters.
Dav2.718