Superficially it may be a cold, damp, gray day in Chicago; psychologically it is morning in America. I hadn’t realized until I went to bed last night, knowing that George W. Bush was reelected, how much shadow the election had cast over my spirit. The hour wasn’t even as late as I had feared it might be, indeed scarcely past my normal bedtime, though the Kerry campaign had yet to concede defeat. As I write, it still hasn’t, but 175,000 provisional ballots (legally presumed to be invalid, let us remember) aren’t going to overturn the President’s 138,000 vote lead in Ohio. For the first time in months, I do not need to think about a Kerry Administration, and the birds are singing in Winter.
While one might think that, after four years of complaining about the unfairness of having a President who finished a fraction of a percent behind in the popular vote count, Democrats would be reluctant to fight in the last ditch for Electoral College victory against a candidate who won an absolute majority and finished 3½ million votes ahead, I suppose that we shall have to listen to hours, if not days, of increasingly fantastic assertions that Senator Kerry will win “when all the votes are counted”. Kerry spokesmen where shrilling that message before the polls closed. Why should they stop now? They know that the elite media won’t criticize them for petulance, and the grievance hunting pleases their large core constituency of conspiracy theorists. (John Hillen aptly calls their insistence that no GOP win can be legitimate “the glue that holds the Dems together”.)
So much for them. I concur with young Jonah:
Went to bed right before Edwards announcement refusing to concede. To be honest, I can’t get too worked up about it. The entire Democratic Party is built around a cult of “never again” with regards to accepting their “victim” status in Presidential politics. Let them have the night. But I think they are making a grave mistake if they are counting on the patience of the American people to endure for very long the clear loser refusing to concede – especially when it’s clear he can’t win. But give ’em the morning. Let them have their coffee. Let the propellor beanie types come in and explain things to them.
My reason for being inordinately chuffed by the Bush victory has little to do with sheer partisanship. Usually I take election results in a properly Stoic manner, neither elated by success nor crushed by failure. What makes this one different is that we are at war, and Senator Kerry volens nolens was the preferred candidate of our enemies. Had he won, thugs in Fallujah would be celebrating gleefully. Now we have reason to hope that they will lose heart and fall more easily to the coming Iraqi-American assault. We can hope, too, that the shell that left-wing media have built around European opinion (vide Davids Medienkiritik to see how German TV covered election night) will begin to crack, and sensible Europeans will figure out that the “hyperpower” is not the great threat that their intelligentsia portray.
Many further thoughts are jumbled together. I’ll post more as the day goes on but first must attend to business.
Update: I see that Senator Kerry has now had the sense to concede. Good for him.
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