Wednesday, November 03, 2004
On Being Wrong
A few of the forecasts I made yesterday were right. Those happened to be the easy ones. All things considered, I might as well have picked a Catholic to be the next Pope. On the big races I was way off. Maybe it came down to a few states and maybe it was fluky - Kerry did come through in iffy states like Wisconsin, New Hampshire, Maine and Pennsylvania. Yesterday's mid-day exit polls made me very very happy. Oh well. False bliss feels real enough at the moment.
I might not have been so heady if I didn't feel that I was mostly on in 2000. You'll have to take my word for it, but I did basically predict the final map except for Florida. Here, things went awry and I'm far from being the only one to be egregiously wrong.
I don't get this country. I don't get this electorate. Without falling utterly into paroxysms of Bush-loathing (which I've generally tried to avoid doing here) I cannot fathom how the man could have won so handily with a popular majority. It reflects badly on us as a nation: on our values, our wisdom and our basic understanding of the world around us. I'm generally at pains to stress that faults people see in Americans are not unique to us - far from it - but are in fact particular variations on common human flaws. Still, I don't see how this happened.
People will bash Kerry the candidate. That's only valuable to a point. If the bashers are former Dean supporters, don't drink the Kool-aid. Bush would have wiped the floor with Dean. Dean wouldn't have been able to compete in Florida at all - look at how poorly he did with southern voters in the primaries. Dean lacks the military service or the experience with foreign policy that were genuine Kerry strengths. He would not have fared better.
It genuinely pleases me to say that Nader was not a factor this time out. He became a shrill self-parody, grousing at the margins. In other words, he's now a boring 3rd party candidate like the others. His performance in Florida was pitiful - he got a third of his vote total from 2000. He failed to make the Ohio ballot at all.
The loss of Daschle is a truly bitter blow. Thune ran a disgraceful campaign and was rewarded for it by a narrow margin. South Dakotans replaced a proven leader with a telegenic hack and I suspect their reward for it will be a greater obscurity.
It promises to be a long four years. Maybe in a few months I'll have words of encouragement, but I wouldn't encourage you to check this blog too frequently. I frankly don't know if its raison d'etre still holds in this scary new world. A basic optimism has usually supported my observations about the world, but clinging to that now would make this blog ridiculous. At the same time, I see little point in posting gloom and doom; there's little service in that. Maybe I'll fixate on foreign issues that are interesting and not ominous, or maybe I'll take a holiday from all this unpleasantness. Stay tuned, I guess.
A few of the forecasts I made yesterday were right. Those happened to be the easy ones. All things considered, I might as well have picked a Catholic to be the next Pope. On the big races I was way off. Maybe it came down to a few states and maybe it was fluky - Kerry did come through in iffy states like Wisconsin, New Hampshire, Maine and Pennsylvania. Yesterday's mid-day exit polls made me very very happy. Oh well. False bliss feels real enough at the moment.
I might not have been so heady if I didn't feel that I was mostly on in 2000. You'll have to take my word for it, but I did basically predict the final map except for Florida. Here, things went awry and I'm far from being the only one to be egregiously wrong.
I don't get this country. I don't get this electorate. Without falling utterly into paroxysms of Bush-loathing (which I've generally tried to avoid doing here) I cannot fathom how the man could have won so handily with a popular majority. It reflects badly on us as a nation: on our values, our wisdom and our basic understanding of the world around us. I'm generally at pains to stress that faults people see in Americans are not unique to us - far from it - but are in fact particular variations on common human flaws. Still, I don't see how this happened.
People will bash Kerry the candidate. That's only valuable to a point. If the bashers are former Dean supporters, don't drink the Kool-aid. Bush would have wiped the floor with Dean. Dean wouldn't have been able to compete in Florida at all - look at how poorly he did with southern voters in the primaries. Dean lacks the military service or the experience with foreign policy that were genuine Kerry strengths. He would not have fared better.
It genuinely pleases me to say that Nader was not a factor this time out. He became a shrill self-parody, grousing at the margins. In other words, he's now a boring 3rd party candidate like the others. His performance in Florida was pitiful - he got a third of his vote total from 2000. He failed to make the Ohio ballot at all.
The loss of Daschle is a truly bitter blow. Thune ran a disgraceful campaign and was rewarded for it by a narrow margin. South Dakotans replaced a proven leader with a telegenic hack and I suspect their reward for it will be a greater obscurity.
It promises to be a long four years. Maybe in a few months I'll have words of encouragement, but I wouldn't encourage you to check this blog too frequently. I frankly don't know if its raison d'etre still holds in this scary new world. A basic optimism has usually supported my observations about the world, but clinging to that now would make this blog ridiculous. At the same time, I see little point in posting gloom and doom; there's little service in that. Maybe I'll fixate on foreign issues that are interesting and not ominous, or maybe I'll take a holiday from all this unpleasantness. Stay tuned, I guess.
