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

Condolences, Matt.

[mckcb.livejournal.com]

The same thing happened a few weeks ago in Australia: a fear-based campaign, and a return of (and strengthening of) the conservative incumbents.

And the scary thing is that you guys don't *have* to vote, and results like this still happen. Yikes!

[manfire.livejournal.com]

Regarding #2, you might not want to go too far in that direction, because you'll risk alienating people the way Newt Gingrich's angry class of '94 did.

Regarding #3, you're right of course, but that's not going to stop my livejournal friends page from filling up with ten million posts about how half the people in the country are knuckle-dragging morons who lack the incredible brilliance and insight to have all the same opinions on everything that the journal writer does. I was hoping all that stuff from both sides would end once the election campaign was over, but now it's not looking like it.

[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.

[warinbabylon.livejournal.com]

*settles down with popcorn to wait out the next four years*

[lots42.livejournal.com]

I'm all for prosecuting up the line for Gharib, even if it means impeaching Bush. If you do the crime, you do the time.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

One thing that does depress me is the continuing control of Republicans over all the branches of the federal government: this has never been the case in my lifetime until George W. Bush's administration.

But this is not a situation unique to failed states or nasty dictatorships, as noted in an intriguing observation from commenter "Gareth" on Crooked Timber (http://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002809.html#comments):

The Republicans (unusually, for American politics) are in a similar position to a party that wins under the Westminister system. In the UK or Canada, the “minority” has no influence on policy either: it just has a shot at taking down the government in a few years.

The key for the Democrats is to avoid going crazy. If they keep disciplined and united, this too will pass.