The People Have Spoken
What a night! I had
insomnia and stayed up till 2 A.M. watching the returns, the result being that a) I'm exhausted, b) late on deadline, and c) more or less incoherent. I'd love to be able to articulate a well-reasoned, forceful, insightful blog item about what it all means. But frankly, I'm not sure I could do that under the best of conditions. So here are my random impressions
1) Whoo-hoo! (See post above.)
2) What a pleasure not to have to see Rick Santorum's smarmy face any more. (Though Bill Bennett said on CNN that there's be a "draft Santorum" movement by the party's social conservative base. Good luck with that, guys. This entire election was a repudiation of you.)
3) Man, were the guys at Fox bummed out. Brit Hume looked like he'd taken about five Zoloft. And Bill Kristol looked massively annoyed—as opposed to his usual, just kind of cranky look— that he was the one who had to work that silly on-screen, football-like chart that they kept using, which was clearly as incomprehensible to him as it was to the rest of us.
4) CNN's coverage was just fundamentally better than Fox's. The Fox team of Hume, Kristol, Kondracke, Barnes, and the token liberal whose name I'm forgetting due to aforementioned insomnia and his own insignificance on Fox, is tired. Not as tired as I am, but tired.
Whereas CNN had better graphics, a wider array of analysts, and less-partisan analysts, such as Jeff Greenfield, Candy Crowley, and John King.
(The guy from Newsweek, however, was a total bust. Did you see him stare into the camera and make what he clearly thought was a dramatic plea to politicians not to put us all through a long, extended recount in Virginia? Painful.)
5) Boy, did John McCain look depressed. For the last year or so, he's been running hard-right, sucking up to the party's ultra-conservative base. Whoops! America just said no to that. McCain sacrificed his principles for political advantage, and now it turns out that he bet wrong. Whoops! He is a far, far weaker presidential candidate than he was a year or so ago.
6) On CNN, McCain was asked about what happened, and he said, "We lost a lot of good men tonight, a lot of close friends." Hey, John—it's not war. The war is actually that thing you've been supporting, and we just rejected it.
7) Joe Lieberman. Ugh. Double-ugh. There was, essentially, no way he could lose when the Republicans' own candidate got a whopping ten percent of the vote. But this win does put him in a strange position. He won with Republicans, considerably more of whom voted for him than did Democrats. But he swore up and down that he'd caucus with the Dems. Will anyone trust him? They shouldn't. Joe Lieberman is out for #1, and always has been.
8) Hillary, Hillary, Hillary. 69% last I saw. She has a problem—her support of the war—but I think that's fixable. ("We were lied to," etc.) She is in a very strong position.
9) Social extremism was rejected...sometimes.
South Dakotans nixed a ban on abortion, but Arizona passed four measures aimed at illegal immigrants, such as one that made English the state's official language. (Oh, grow up, Arizona.) Anti-gay marriage amendments passed in Tennesse, Idaho, South Carolina, Virginia, and Wisconsin (Wisconsin?), meaning that homophobia is the one value that both liberals and conservatives can agree on. Also meaning that straight people want the ability to screw without consequences, but they don't want gay people to be able to screw responsibly. Go figure.
10) Nancy Pelosi may be the first female speaker of the House, but she didn't help the Dems much, and let's face it, she's no political visionary. Never has such a mediocre politician benefited so consistently from being in the right place at the right time.
11) Rahm Emanuel, on the other hand, is smart, tough, and ballsy. (I can't believe
I wrote about him 13 years ago! Holy cow, where did the time go? And did I really say that David Gergen "wears ideologies like Mr. Potato Head wears faces"? In retrospect, I...like it!)
12) I love that the
ultra-tough-on-immigration GOP congressman lost in Arizona, and wish I could say that it meant support for a more enlightened immigration policy. But given the success of those anti-immigrant proposals there, I'd have to say it's more just a middle finger to Bush.
13) The single biggest loser of the night...
Kevin Federline. The gravy train is over, my friend. And just as Britney's looking good again.....
14) Second biggest loser: George Bush. That giant sucking sound you hear is the relevance leaking out of the last two years of his administration. He deserves the come-uppance. Centrists like me gave Bush a chance. Okay, he's president, even though he may not really be president. Maybe he really will govern from the center. Maybe that compassionate conservatism stuff really isn't all bullshit.
Nah. It was all bullshit.
15) Other losers: Donald Rumsfeld—pack your bags, Mr. Secretary. Karl Rove—not such a genius any more, are you? Rush Limbaugh—probably the difference in Claire McCaskill's Missouri victory. Dick Cheney—"
full speed ahead" in Iraq? I don't think so. Ken Mehlman: Well, despite your best (and sincere, I think) efforts to reach out to new voter blocs, blacks and Latinos have repudiated your party more than ever. You are now basically the party of the Southern homophobic white. Demographically—speaking, good luck with that.
16) And speaking of Missouri, can we institute a ban on anyone who is not actually from that state pronouncing it "Missour-ah"? Please, people. Just because they speak funny doesn't mean everyone else has to. Leave it to the candidates to suck up to Mis-ery voters by affecting a regional accent. (And good for you, Anderson Cooper—you not only did a fine job last night, but you refused to play along with the Missour-ah game.)
17) Another loser: the New York state Republican party, which got, like, six votes yesterday. You people are pathetic. Here's a suggestion: Maybe Al D'Amato really isn't the best guy to be the most powerful person in your party.
18) Part of me feels bad for
moderate Republicans like Lincoln Chafee and Nancy Johnson. But not that bad.
19) Arnold. Man, he looks good—that guy is Botoxed up the wazoo. His win shows that
progressive government—and a pro-environmental stance—can be a winning combination for Republicans, who are now more and more isolated on the environmental issue. Voters may not rank it up there with Iraq and the economy, but it's a factor, no question.
20) Winners: The American people. I happen to like the way the votes went, for the most part, but the thing I really like is that the voters made a difference. As much as the incumbents try to make it impossible to ever lose their seats, and the Washington lobbyists try to prop up those they've been paying off for years, sometimes the people show that democracy can still work. It ain't pretty, but it's a beautiful thing.
