Some thoughts on the single most surreal election victory in US history:
1. I’ve been saying for years that the further away you go from urban areas, the further back in time you go. For example, in Harrison there are still sack boys who bag your groceries and carry them to your car for you. This just isn’t done anymore in big cities. Also, Harrison is a haven for white power organizations which are getting harder to find these days. For better or worse, rural = past, and urban = future and somewhere in between is the present day. While watching the election results last night, I was struck by the fact that nearly all urban areas tended to vote Democrat and nearly all rural areas vote Republican. Now, I don’t want to sound elitist, and it should be noted that I come from a very small town, but the division of stupidity in this country clearly weighs heavily on the side of rural. To make a broad generalization (but one that I would wager is demographically sound), the Republican Party is the party of the rural and the rich, and that’s a powerful combination because the latter can so easily manipulate the former. Factor in the “don’t switch horses in midstream” school of foreign policy, and there’s your Bush win.
2. The Electoral College is still a sham. People who live in a state surrounded by people who disagree with them are essentially wasting their vote. Whether you are a liberal in Arkansas or a conservative in New York, you are disenfranchised by the Electoral College.
3. This nonsense about waiting for Ohio’s provisional votes is ludicrous. Oh how I prayed that Kerry would win the electoral vote and not the popular vote, just so I could watch everyone who trumpeted the virtues of the Electoral College four years ago change their tune.
4. H.L. Mencken said “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it, good and hard.”
5. I don’t know if I can take four more years of angst, anti-science, environmental rape, no-bid contracts, lowered standards, higher body counts, cynical manipulation of facts, shouting smug punditry, neoconservative empire-building.
6. As usual, Mark Morford says it better than I.