election

Wow, what an election, still came down to a within-error-of-margin squeaker in the popular vote, but it's nice to see a little harmony for a change.
Honestly given the last two elections I expected a hardscrabble fight to the last bitter moment.

Makes me happy that the margin was really too far to be litigated away.

I expected it to go until 4am

it was over, practically, by 8:30 central when Obama hit 206 electoral votes and you could count of California Oregon and Washington to put him over the 270 mark and into the white house.

It was almost... anticlimactic. The Bush administration and eight long years of neoconservative domination died in, well from 6am to 8:30pm. Not that McCain was a neocon anyway, not a Bush-style one beholden only to the radical party fringe. That itself says something to.

A lot of pundits are going over McCain's performance with a fine-toothed come, looking for the moment it went wrong. Some say it was choosing Palin, which took experience off the issue and, in CNN's words "made voters question his judgement." Some point to wall street deciding to spontaneously and utterly lose their collective sh*t a month before the election. But in the end, it's one lone bullet point that did it. Bush. Distance from Bush, support of bush, accepting endorsement from Bush.

He screwed the pooch so badly his party was in an untenable position. Nothing associated with the Republicans could do well this year, not in the house, not in the senate, not for the white house, not govenors, heck, I think it'd be tough to get elected as a republican mayor of a small town.

in 2000 and even 2004 it's arguable whether Bush actually won, let alone if he had a clear mandate to act. But here, as fractitious as politics are a close popular vote doesn't tell the tale as much as the electoral does. And obama won almost than three fourths of the country. Whether it was a vote against Bush or against McCain or a vote for Obama the message was pretty clear: Americans want change now.