Home > Jay Bookman > Archives > 2008 > November > 06
Thursday, November 6, 2008
And the winner is…..
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
It’s Thursday, two days after election day, and only now have they called North Carolina. Missouri by some counts is still too close to call, although McCain has a slight lead there with 100 percent of precincts reporting.
Imagine if this had been a close race, with the presidency at stake and North Carolina and Missouri still dangling two days later. The lawyers would be fighting, the media would be going nuts — a nightmare revisited.
Which brings me to the announcement of our winner in our unofficial election prediction contest. With North Carolina in Obama’s column, and assuming Missouri stays red, Obama’s electoral vote total will be 364. Five entrants correctly predicted that total — Tom, ByteME, Allman, TNGelding and Logical Dude.
The tiebreaker was the winner’s percent of the popular vote, which at last count was 52.5 percent. On that basis, the winner of the contest is ….
D R U M R O L L ……
Allman! With a prediction of 52.1 percent!
And yes, for those who have inquired, the dollar that Jim Wooten bet me right after the Palin announcement is now sitting in my wallet.
Permalink | Comments (103) | Post your comment |
How many wakeup calls can they sleep through?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
I see where Karl Rove and others are still insisting that the United States is a center-right country, despite what the election returns say.
Let’s assume they’re right, just for the sake of argument. An obvious question then arises:
In a center-right country, how badly did the Republicans have to screw up to lose the presidency to a black alleged socialist-Marxist named Barack Hussein Obama? Maybe he’s not a socialist, or maybe the country isn’t center-right.
The same question can be asked about Congress:
In a center-right country, how incompetent do the Republicans have to be to lose more than a dozen Senate seats and more than 50 House seats to the liberal Democrats in the last two election cycles? I mean, that’s hard to do.
The GOP has long had a hard time making its version of reality match up to actual reality. But that mismatch is particularly glaring when the topic is the party itself.
Permalink | Comments (174) | Post your comment |
Tell me again how the media were unfair to Palin…
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Permalink | Comments (212) | Post your comment |
Election reveals ‘real America’
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
An election is much more than a mechanism for picking leaders. It’s part of the process by which a nation defines and reinvents itself, the means by which it expresses its dreams and fears.
The election of 2008, for example, was not merely a battle over whether Barack Obama or John McCain would be our next president. That’s an important decision, but it alone could never have stirred the depths of passion we saw on both sides.
This was also a battle for higher stakes, a fight over what America means to its citizens and to the world.
That kind of debate happens in other nations too, but I think the stakes are higher here. We are a nation defined by boundaries on the map, but not by boundaries of the mind or heart or history. There is nothing fixed or final about America, no limits to what we might do or become beyond those set in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. And even those limits are more plastic than many would admit.
For example, we Americans have agreed since our founding that “all men are created equal.” It seems a simple, straightforward premise, but those words have a very different meaning today than when they flowed from the quill of Thomas Jefferson.
His concept of equality did not extend to black Americans or Native Americans or to women of any race, but subsequent generations have fought to realize the untapped potential in Jefferson’s phrase. More than 200 years later, the words are the same but the meaning has changed.
That’s why it’s so foolish to talk about a “real America” or “real Americans.” There can be no “real America,” at least not in the singular sense. Instead, each American citizen has his or her own concept of America — an image of what our country was in the past, what it is today and what it ought to be tomorrow.
We each have our own private America, so to speak, and it is very real to us.
For that reason, we can all be un-American or even anti-American in someone else’s eyes, in the sense that we challenge the America they carry around in their head. Elections are part of the means for working out such conflict peaceably, to come to some sort of consensus.
Sometimes it isn’t easy. In the last few weeks of the campaign, as polls began to make the final outcome pretty clear, I was struck by the number of people insisting that the America they knew could never elect a man like Obama as president. It simply could not happen.
Others were certain that if Obama were elected the nation would be doomed.
In a way, they were right. Their America, the America in their heads, could never elect Barack Hussein Obama as president.
Now that it happened anyway, their concept of America is in need of some serious recalibration.
A lot of black Americans have also been forced to recalibrate, although for them the surprise is a little more pleasant. They too had an image of an America — forged through centuries of heartache, pain and repression —- that could never elect a black person as president.
As we saw Tuesday night, seldom have so many been so joyous about being so wrong.
Another great moment came Wednesday morning, in a statement by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
“One of the great things about representing this country is it continues to surprise; it continues to renew itself; it continues to beat all odds and expectations,” Rice said, her eyes watering. “You just know that Americans are not going to be satisfied until they really do form that perfect union. And while the perfect union may never be in sight, we just keeping working at it and trying.”
“As an African-American, I am especially proud because this is a country that’s been through a long journey in terms of overcoming wounds and making race not the factor in our lives,” she said. “That work is not done, but yesterday was obviously an extraordinary step forward.”
Unfortunately, words on paper can’t make you hear the marvel in Rice’s voice as she spoke. Her “real America” turned out to be a better place than she knew, and the discovery thrilled her.
She wasn’t the only one.
.JPG)
-1.JPG)
Services »
