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November 03, 2004

Thinking of Ways to Gloat, Not.

Aside from the fact that I am wearing all red today, I'm pretty much at the same level that I was yesterday. No nervousness, no excitement, just happy to be on the same vibe as 51% of America.

To tell the truth, I'm actually more excited to see Tom Daschle get the boot. That's worth gloating over. Other than that I'm curious to see what superlatives left partisans are hurling. I'd imagine that God's call center has a very long queue today.

Last night I had my spreadsheet and made my call at 9:15. It went the way I thought. I was surprised that Kerry refused to concede considering that Alaska too was on the Bush column, but we all knew that it came down to Ohio.

What interests me today is the amount of excuse-making and apathy people whose faith was broken yesterday we are going to have to suffer through. The election is going to 'prove' all kinds of consipiracy theories, and the wierd will just get weirder. Meanwhile, those of us with the political bug will find new things to talk about.

I don't have any reason to gloat really. I'm hoping that the percentages for Bush were higher in Cali than were expected. I'm fairly confident that the percentages of blacks for Bush were doubled - we'll see and hear spin soon enough.

We all had a moment, an overly long moment, to come together and squabble about stuff we generally understand and don't directly influence. In this moment, called election season, people get illogical in their logic - thinking everything they think matters and makes a difference. I got fed up with it a while back, and the final straw was Kerry (or was it Edwards) talking about how impressed he was that Cheney loved his daughter. We're all going to take our favorite symbols and suggest that these things we were so convinced we were right about distinguishes us from the fools who went the other way. That's just a continuation of the same delusion. I'm not going there.

I think the interview Thune gave this morning on NPR was just about right. We took advantage of the way the issues divided us to reach out to a few more people that we can agree with long enough for our election goals to be met. Now it's over, and we can get back to being normal people. We aren't really red and blue people, we just wear the colors for a few weeks, and then we go back to not particularly loving, hating or caring about other Americans we don't even know.

The process works. Congratulations America, you've shown yourself entirely capable of committing to non-violently turning over the most power in the world. That's always reassuring. Now, back to our regularly scheduled programming. It will be nice to once again be able to make political commentary without all the exclamation points.

Posted by mbowen at November 3, 2004 12:38 PM

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