I'll indulge myself in one post-Tuesday comment.
My preferred candidate didn't win (at time of press the Kerry campaign has not conceded, but I'm assuming that the outstanding difference in the Ohio count is insufficiently small to make a sustained challenge prudent, and that the Democrats will throw in the towel shortly). But: the fears of critical voting irregularities don't seem to have materialized. And the popular vote has parallelled the electoral college count (as someone who would prefer the college was scrapped I suppose I should regret this on the principle of 'multiply the contradictions', but I don't. Even though this may make electoral reform more difficult, I am glad that the country's rickety apparatus has managed to elect a President successfully. Whether it can continue to do this for such a neatly bisected electorate remains unclear.) There was no Nader factor this time: or, rather, the small number of folks who voted for Nader did so because they genuinely wanted him for President, not because they wanted to send a nihilistic message of protest to their 'real' candidate - no-one can be labelled the spoiler in 2004. It's healthier for the Union that its leader be seen to have won without dispute; it's also healther for his opposition, I suspect, as it dampens the kind of self-defeating sulkiness that has characterized some of the anti-Bush mood these last four years. And who knows: maybe the returned administration will celebrate its real but narrow victory by pursuing less stridently divisive policies for the next four years ... alright, sleep deprivation is obviously setting in here. In any case, that's as much of a glass-half-full summary as I can manage this morning.
Posted by Alan Allport at November 3, 2004 04:23 AM