THE DAILY BLADE: Hope Triumphs Over Reason
We all know what happened yesterday: America elected its first biracial president, Barack Hussein Obama – apparently the MSM has decided that now that the election is over it’s no longer “racist” to use his Muslim middle name.
Arguably the least qualified candidate ever to seek the office of president – true, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush had no foreign policy experience but they all had executive experience, having served full terms as governors of CA, AR and TX, respectively - Obama talked himself into the job and now he’s got to do it. But while the public was unforgiving of President Bush’s failures - and John McCain’s candidacy was hobbled because of them - Obama will be able to blame his ineptitude on Bush, and a biased MSM and a compliant Congress will let him get away with it.
Despondent conservatives need to suck it up and gut it out until the 2010 mid-term elections, at which point voters may well decide that more or different change is needed than what they got in the 2008 election and the balance of power in Congress could shift back to Republicans. Then Obama will find that glibness and governance are not synonymous.
Meanwhile, here’s a rundown what didn’t happen – you know, all the inside baseball stuff that political pundits and reporters wasted their time – and ours – publicly debating and fretting over, instead of vetting Obama:
† There were isolated problems at polling places, including machine malfunctions, long lines and polls opening late but not a mass meltdown – in fact, the vast majority of voters who participated in The Washington Post’s Vote Monitor 2008 reported having no problems at all at the polls. While The New York Times reports that there were long lines at many polling places – exacerbated by mechanical breakdowns of Sixties-era voting machines and “confusion among poll workers” – The Stiletto had a very different experience when she went to vote at 8:30 am in one of the Outer Boroughs that The Times doesn’t really consider part of its beat. Though the place was packed, poll workers – many of whom had worked that location for years – efficiently directed people to the correct voting station, signed them in and explained how to use the machines. The Stiletto was in and out in 10 minutes and got to work at her usual time. Exactly 12 hours later when she accompanied The Heel to his polling place in Greenwich Village, there were no lines at all and he also in and out in 10 minutes. (He would have been done sooner had he not written our names on the ballot for a couple of open positions; it would just be The Stiletto’s luck to get elected to an office she did not even know she was running for).
† Polling locations had at least one Repub and one Dem election monitor on site, and the army of lawyers who fanned out across the nation – particularly in battleground states – to ferret out violations of voting law apparently found nothing to make a federal case over. Not having to contend with Black Panthers “guarding” polling locations, the only “irregularity” The Stiletto herself witnessed was a poll worker at a school in Greenwich Village who was on her cell phone getting early results from ME, NH and other states and calling out Obama’s wins to her colleagues. The Stiletto protested that what she was doing could influence voters and was against the law, and was backed up by another poll worker – an older woman who had obviously worked an election once or twice before. The more experienced poll worker asked her colleague to continue the cell phone conversation somewhere more private. FYI: At this polling location, The Stiletto could not find the Repub monitor; the Dem vote monitor was not within earshot of the cell phone conversation, and was unaware of the issue.
† The down-ballot races were not quite the blowout that Dems and the MSM had hoped for. Dems gained seats in both houses of Congress to retain its majority, but appear to be a hair short of a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate (there will likely be a recount in MN, as the margin between Norm Coleman and Al Franken is only 572 votes). In most cases, voters traded a RINO for a Dem, which means the surviving House Repubs are rock-solid conservatives. At the end of the day, Dems were up 18 seats in the House, rather than the 30 they had been licking their chops over (252 to 173), and 5 seats in the Senate (56 to 41).
† Once again, the “youthquake” failed to materialize. Voters between the ages of 18 and 29 represented 18 percent of the electorate, just one percentage point more than in 2004 – so much for texting, tweeting and friending. Still, they went for Obama by a more than 2-to-1 margin.
† While voter turnout overall reached historic highs, amongst black voters it was only two percentage points higher than in the previous presidential election (13 percent vs. 11 percent); 95 percent of these votes went to Obama. This election as in 2004, non-Hispanic whites had the highest voter turnout (74 percent vs. 67 percent) even “racist” white voters supported Obama 55 percent to 43 percent – that’s a higher level of white support than George Bush got against John Kerry in 2004, when he beat the Dem by 17 percentage points amongst this group. This should put a stake in the heart of the so-called Bradley Effect once and for all.
† Exit polls suggest that a significant percentage of PUMAs and other Hillary Clinton supporters did make good on their promise (or threat, depending on your point of view) to vote for McCain – he got 15 percent of this vote – and he beat Obama amongst white women by seven percent. But in the end, it wasn’t enough to overcome Obama’s advantage with first-time voters (72 percent to 27 percent); black voters; and Hispanic voters (67 percent to 30 percent). However, going forward the party needs to mend fences with disaffected Dem women because Dems can’t count on having another candidate with Obama’s funding, organization and discipline to be able to shrug off the loss of their votes.
† The networks did not call the election too soon, as some had predicted, and instead bent over backwards not to repeat the mistakes of the previous two elections by imposing a four-hour embargo on exit poll results, waiting until polls closed in a particular state before reporting on voting trends and waiting until one candidate reached the magic number of 270 Electoral College votes before declaring the victor (voters were able to get all this information online in real time from a variety of Web sites and blogs to draw their own conclusions about how things were going for their candidate).
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