Tfgray’s Weblog

I’ve been away, watching, but not commenting, on the 2009 elections. Events in the 23rd District of New York, in particular, appear to confirm my earlier prediction of Republican schism. So far, there are two sides to the split: the moderate, centrist flavor and the Extra Spicy conservative. I’m going to go out on a limb and predict that the Extra Spicy will itself split into the religious and libertarian factions, most likely just after the 2010 elections. (In a power struggle if they win; in a toxic fume of recrimination if not.)

The results are not all in yet, as I write, but so far Corzine and Deeds have succumbed, Bloomberg has held on in NYC, and Owens leads in New York State. Expect the Republicans to blame the losses on Obama. (Side note: Rep. Joe Wilson, who voted against funding for H1N1 vaccine production, is blaming his wife’s Swine Flu on Guess Who?) I think that Rachel Maddow and Jane Hamsher had an interesting take, however: that Corzine’s loss and Bloomberg’s fairly tight win had something to do with their association with Wall Street wealth. They both outspent their opponents massively and got a loss and a squeaker to show for it. This election is about the electorate turning away from a business-as-usual model that has benefited The Few to the tune of taxpayer billions.

Uncle Pat was on with Chris, claiming that this turn from business as usual would benefit his favorite brand of right wingery, but I have my doubts. I can see where the Right would turn away from the Republican Party, which consistently enlarged the national debt and instituted policies favorable to the wealthy. Unfortunately, the policies favored by the Right will exacerbate the concentration of wealth and pull the support system out from under everyone else. I disagree with his assertion that this is what the American people really want.

Meanwhile, despite Virginia’s amazingly consistent record of voting for a governor of a party opposite the president’s, despite Craig Deeds not particularly good campaign, despite Corzine’s personal unpopularity and so-so record, despite exit polls showing that about 60% of voters didn’t let their feelings for or against Obama affect their vote in the least, with the remainder being split fairly evenly for and against, there will be those only too willing to attribute the state-level losses to the president.

If Hoffman takes the 23rd, expect to hear nothing else for the next year.

This just in: Hoffman has conceded. Gazing into my crystal ball, I see the Extra Spicy crowd coming to the conclusion that if they’d just started backing Hoffman a little earlier, they’d have pulled it off. Chris Matthews was just on with a radio personality I’d never heard of, who announced that “all” Republican leadership must go, although he refused to mention anyone by name.  (Mostly he stuck with the buzzwords “Obama” and “Pelosi.”) Maybe I’m alone in this, but the way I see it, the Republican Party had a safe seat in upper New York State until Palin and Armey stuck their big noses in and dragged in some out-of-towner to hand the election to the Democrats. Encouraged by this turn of events, they plan to take it national, gunning for every Republican incumbent to the left of Attilla the Hun. Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.

This should make for an interesting couple of years.

The first omen was small. The Steelers trounced the Redskins 23-6 on Sunday. For some unknown reason, the Redskins game the Sunday before the election has predicted the fortunes of the incumbent party in 15 of the last 16 presidential elections.

Then came Dixville Notch, NH, where midnight voting occurred before my West Coast bedtime. The 21 voters there split 15-6 Obama. The pundits warned that the results were “not predictive” as New Hampshire generally goes Republican, but the magnitude of the victory gave me cause to think of this as an omen.

The next was larger. I logged on to Huffington Post election morning and read that by 6 am, over 1000 Penn State students had lined up waiting for the polls to open at 7. All the conservative pundits’ predictions of “traditionally low turnout among young voters” evaporated. I teared up for the first of many times. By the end of the day, the sight of 30 Rock lit up in Red, White, and Blue was enough to set me off.

I was good yesterday, fighting my urge to obsessively watch the talking heads blather until they had something to actually talk about.  I vacuumed, did laundry, ran errands, called my kids and confirmed that they had all voted, two of them for the first time. I gave in at 3:30. Most Indiana polls had closed, so their might actually be some news, but the vote in that traditionally Republican state was so close that it was one of the last called by the networks.

We ate dinner on the sofa, watching the returns come in, listening to Chuck Todd and Rachel Maddow remind us that Obama’s early victories were all in Kerry states, that he had yet to flip a Red State to Blue. Then Ohio went blue. “Yes!” my husband and I chorused, as if our team had scored a last-minute touchdown. The dog cringed, and had to be reassured that he hadn’t done anything wrong and we weren’t yelling at him. We celebrated with a mini-eclair each.

Two more rounds of mini eclairs and it was over. Barack Obama had won. The world rejoiced.

John McCain gave his concession speech, in my estimation his best speech of the campaign. He was once again the John McCain I remembered, who cared about his country, who told the truth, who worked with Republicans and Democrats alike. His supporters booed each mention of Obama’s name, underlining how petty and mean-spirited his campaign had become in its final throes, or perhaps how the petty and mean-spiritedness of the Base had drawn his campaign down to its level. Time will tell.  Obama gave his speech, and everyone cheered at his mention of McCain. Maybe that was because they were just in a better mood. Maybe it was because they had not been told, over and over, that John McCain was an evil terrorist who was out to destroy the nation.

And so it begins. We went to bed with Missouri still a toss-up. I woke in the middle of the night and took a peek at the tube. Some right-wing third stringer on Fox pontificated that it would have been wrong for McCain to run to the center because, after all, the centrists voted for Obama, ignoring the fact that McCain chose to demonize their positions, rather than court their votes. The next morning the rightward side of the airways was filled with dire warnings of a Reid/Pelosi agenda, no make that “a Reid/Pelosi left-wing agenda” that would cripple an Obama presidency, and the insistance that, since the Dems failed to win a filibuster-proof 60 senate seats, he would need to compromise with Republicans, specifically with the rightward edge of the Republican Party. Sure, just like Bush, with his razor-thin majority and questionable electoral mandate had to govern from the center.

Obama’s already way ahead of them. In his victory speech he reiterated his intention to listen to all positions and to make clear his reasons for his decisions, to support policies that actually work for America, not for one subset of Americans at the expense of the whole.  He’s technologically hip. I can see him giving a speech on taxation at a Chuck Todd-style touchscreen, showing how the Bush tax cuts not only ballooned the deficit but reapportioned American income and wealth into the hands of the top 5%. (And even more tellingly, the top .5%.) That’s what’s been lacking in these debates. Graphics.

After the Watergate hearings and subsequent Republican drubbing in the ‘74 and ‘76 elections, after Iran/Contra and Clinton’s victory, we cheered. We won! We stopped them! We went back to our day-to-day lives and left the governing to Washington. But they didn’t stop. The day-to-day lives of the Republican insiders, after all, involves pulling down a paycheck to think up ways to take power. Each time they came back. The same faces in bigger offices with fancier titles. Don’t get fooled again. They won’t give up this time, either.

Stay tuned. I really mean it.

I came across a news item yesterday that said that a California Republican committee chairwoman had been asked to resign for forwarding an email suggesting that Barack Obama was the Antichrist. Leaving aside that the email’s claim that the Book of Revelation says that the Antichirst will be of Muslim descent (The word “Muslim” does not appear in the Bible. Mohammad was born about 300 years after the last book was written.) The email raises an interesting theological point: according to Revelation, Jesus won’t return until after the Antichrist gets to run the place for a while.

So doesn’t that mean that all Bible believin’ folks should vote for  Obama?

No wonder they canned her.