It looks like Obama is the winner and without much controversy, so thankfully it seems we will be spared endless images of hanging chads. It also appears he won the popular vote as well so the GOP can’t complain that he ‘stole’ the election (but it was OK for Bush, wasn’t it?). I am so _so_ glad that it is over and maybe, just maybe, the next election cycle will hold off and give us at least two years of peace and quite before we start this crap all over again.
As a btw, I was indeed too lazy to vote, so Jill Stein didn’t get my nod. My wife woke up early this morning and rushed to the TV (why she picked Fox I don’t understand, it must have been the channel on from when it was turned off) and was quite happy when she learned that Obama has been declared the winner (she has been a fervent supporter of the GOP until Romney).
My prediction, for what it is worth, is that while there will be plenty of people in the GOP who will dig in their heels, there will be more than enough that will realize that there hasn’t been that groundswell of support for the rabid right wing like the Tea Partiers were insisting and will be in a much more compromising mindset. Presuming Obama is clever enough to make it sound like he is trying to be accommodating (he sure as hell has bent over backwards in the past, much to the horror of the progressives) and a relative handful of GOP members turn their back on Norquist and his idiot pledge, we can finally raise taxes. I don’t see the military being cut like it should be, but hopefully they can slow the growth to at least match inflation.
Conventional wisdom said that all Romney had to be was not-Obama to win, given the economic situation, but he got so desperate to be the not-Obama in the end that it seems he started to alienate the few people sitting on the fence. While I think Obama will be (has been) a terrible President, I think he will be less terrible than Romney. I will be more than a bit surprised if Obama doesn’t have a rather productive next two (maybe two and half) years. As mentioned, I expect there to be enough ‘defectors’ in the GOP to allow Obama to raise taxes and for the most part, I can’t think of anything else the GOP really disagrees with (shouted rhetoric to the contrary). While it would be a substantial hit to the economy, I would actually like to see us ride over the ‘fiscal cliff’ and finally get rid of the damn Bush tax cuts and reduce the military budget. Sadly, I am convinced that won’t be the case; ‘rationality’ will prevail and instead we will get increased military spending, though I am hopeful that we will also increase taxes. My most fervent wish, but one that I expect won’t be realized, is that they do away with the massive perks to the wealthy and ensure that everyone who has more income than I do (most _particularly_ through investment income!) pays a higher tax rate than I do.
Since our economy, despite the GOP wailing to the contrary, is indeed recovering, in 3-4 years it should be cooking along with unemployment much lower (though I am sure that inflation adjusted wages will be even lower than before the crash, but such is expected to be the case in an oligarchy controlled government), so it seems very plausible to me that we might wind up with another Democrat as President in ’16. If the GOP fields the same lot of idiots that they did this time then I expect they will be spending a lot of time in the wastelands. If, instead, they can tone down the right-wing fringe and get someone in like Jon Huntsman or Colin Powell, then they might be able to make some headway. Their primary problem is they insist on depending on the white male voter demographic, which shrinks every year (I think there is enough proof today that it has shrunk so much they cannot be elected by that demographic alone anymore). Of course, I am sure that some will cling to the idea that Romney was a sellout and had one of the others made it as the candidate they would have won, but I expect that most of the party leaders will realize that their strategy cannot work any longer and they are going to be forced to appeal to women and minorities. Given their current platform that will take some doing, but they have a while to think about it before their next chance comes up.
Yes the popular vote has been close, but really, the polls have consistently shown that Obama was comfortably ahead in all the important swing states. So, why has this been consistently reported as a nail biter contest that could go either way? I go with the ‘vast conspiracy’ of media types wanting to keep as many eyeballs as they could. If they talked about how it was 90% likely that Obama was going to get elected (from what I recall he has been well over 70% the whole time) I guess viewers would have shrugged and moved on. Only by constantly talking about how close it was and endlessly emphasizing the small gains that Romney made could they provide the illusion that this was a close race. I also find it plausible that the Democrats bolstered the noise that it was close in an attempt to keep their base motivated as it would matter greatly if a bunch of supporters stayed home.
What is next for Romney? Hopefully he will fade from view (if I were a praying type I would pray that Trump would fade from sight, but I doubt that media hog would ever fade). I wonder if he really thought he had the election in the bag and really did only prepare a victory speech. If so, then it is his own fault for surrounding himself with yes men who wouldn’t tell him about reality and, if true, speaks volumes about the type of advisers he would have surrounded himself with. For his own sake I hope he really did understand that he was a huge underdog with well under a 30% chance of winning. Maybe he will try again in ’16, but I somehow think that there will be too much bad blood between him and the wingnuts to allow him to survive the primaries and how embarrassing would it be to not even get the primary win.
I have yet to get any information on the percentage of votes cast for third parties or if any third-party candidates ‘down ticket’ actually got elected. A friend last night commented that everyone he talked to said they had gone third-party, but then again, we are in Maryland which was solidly Obama so people could ‘afford’ to cast a ‘protest’ vote. I hope that the credible third-party candidates (in my estimation, only the two: Greens and Libertarians) have a decent showing and maybe I will comment when I finally find some data.
