Post-Election Blogview

Relieved that the election is over, and downright giddy about the presidential result and the apparent move of the nation to the center-right, we decided this morning to surf the Pundits at Blogs4God to listen in on the chatter. Here’s a sampling:



Veritas: Did you know that Kerry's margin of victory was smaller in Pennsylvania than was Bush's in Ohio?



Midwest Conservative Journal : When asked what he planned to do if Kerry lost the election, Soros said that he plans to enter a monastery for a time because he will need to contemplate what is wrong with the people of this country.. . .Michael Moore is not dealing with yesterday very well at all. But in Mike's defense, you'd be bent too if you'd spent your own money and all that time and effort to make a very long Kerry campaign commercial only to have your man lose as badly as Senator Kerry did. But cheer up, Mike. They're probably going to give you an Oscar for the thing and so you'll get at least one world-wide forum soon to tell us how stupid and evil we are.



The folks at provided Junkyard Blog more thoughts on what we commented on yesterday—the partial courage at NBC—from an interview of Brokaw by Imus:



Imus: What was the the President waiting for to declare victory---some network to award him Nevada or New Mexico?



Brokaw: No. I think he was at one point. We had emails and calls from the White House [asking] "Why aren't you calling Nevada and New Mexico?"



We were not going to get into that position as long as the Kerry people were contesting Ohio, as I think they had every right to do. We wanted to let that play out because they felt they could pull that back into their column. That's why their doing that. And after what we went through 4 years ago, we weren't going to get into a position where we were going to declare a winner and have to pull that back or something else would happen.



So, we just stopped declaring states after Ohio at 269.



Well! How convenient! So NBC knew if they called Nevada, they would be forced to admit Bush won the majority of electoral votes. So they held out hope for Kerry and refused to call it.



One Hand Clapping comments John Kerry's concession speech was gracious and gentlemanly. I really liked his near-closing line, "I saw in them the truth that America is not only great, but it is good." It brought to my mind de Tocqueville's observation that America is great because Americans are good, and that when Americans cease to be good, America will cease to be great. Kerry gave the explanation for his concession clearly, cogently and gently. Whatever criticisms have been offered about his turgid speaking style in recent months (many by his ideological allies), this speech, ironically, was well composed and finely delivered. He stated that he wanted the election to be decided by the voters, not courts, and having done the arithmetic, he bowed out as gracefully as anyone had a right to expect. All Americans were well served by John Kerry at the close of his campaign.



From The Ever-Changing Selection : Kerry concedes. What a relief. When I went to bed at 3am last night, I thought I might have to break out the surplus Sore Loserman shirts. The Democrats obviously saw that Kerry wasn't going to overtake Bush's lead in Ohio with the outstanding provisional ballots. It's too early to make any sort of definitive statement about this race. I suspect, however, that when all is said and done, evangelical Christians will have played a (if not the) deciding role in the president's re-election. Chris Matthews says pretty much the same thing, and the New Republic's election blog concurs. Exit polls showed that evangelicals went about 75 percent for Bush in swing states like Ohio, energized in no small part by the various anti-gay marriage amendments in the states (all of which won, even in liberal bastions like Oregon). The voters had enough of Democrats trying to change the culture via the Courts, so they made their voices heard. The president benefits because he speaks the language of faith and believers identify with him.

Very interesting article by Rick Penner at Right Left Whatever : The results of the election have apparently baffled liberals: they're shocked and “disturbed” that values could be more important to many Americans than economic conditions. I’ve written about this here, before, but I’ll repeat: a highly prophetic book that came out just before the 2000 election has a great deal to say on this: book entitled The Fourth Great Awakening & the Future of Egalitarianism by Robert William Fogel. . . .He sees the last Awakening as a shift from the push for egalitarianism of material needs during the 3rd Awakening to a yearning for egalitarianism of spiritual needs (also called “immaterial” needs or “knowledge capital”).



He says that the new equity issues of the 4th Awakening -- unlike the 3rd Awakening -- “do not arise from the shock of rapid urbanization, the destruction of small businesses by competition from industrial giants, the massive destitution created by the prolonged unemployment of up to one-quarter of prime-age workers, the disappearance of the frontier as a safety valve for urban unemployment and poverty.”



Rather, people now want to “have an understanding of life’s opportunities, a sense of which opportunities are most attractive to him or her at each stage of life, and the requisite educational, material, and spiritual resources to pursue these opportunities.”



Surprisingly: “Like it or not, the reform agenda spelled out by the religious Right, with its focus on the restoration of the traditional family and its emphasis on equality of opportunity, more fully addresses the new issues of egalitarianism than does the agenda of the Third Great Awakening.”



Fogel goes on to say that Republicans and conservatives will probably benefit the most from this 4th Awakening -- such that Republicans will predominate over the next decade or two.



From Viewpoint Journal: Kerry’s loss is not the biggest blow to the DNC in this election. The biggest loss for Dems in this election cycle was the loss of their Senate Minority Chair, Tom Daschle. Senator Daschle is, in my opinion, the DNC’s strongest party leader. A few years back, he managed to tilt the balance of power in the Senate, giving Democrats control for almost two years and, even after losing the majority status again in 2002, managed to turn back an impressive number of conservative initiatives and block a sizable number of Bush’s judicial picks. Speaking as a staunch Republican, it looked to me as if Daschle was the guy in charge in the US Senate, not Bill Frist. But now, of course, Daschle has been ousted, and his loss is, by far, the biggest blow for Democrats



At Priorities & Frivolities: Bush proposed the federal marriage amendment to spark social conservatives nationwide. But it also translated into a pitch for Ohio, where an initiative passed overwhelmingly last night. And it translated into a pitch for socially conservative blacks in that crucial state. Consider: in 2000, Bush got just 9% of Ohio's African Americans. Last night, he got 16%. In 2000, he got about 8% of blacks across the country. Last night, he got 11%. To be sure, these exit-poll results may be somewhat off, and it's hard to determine how much of Bush's increases can be directly attributed to black voters. Still, here's a rather important case in which the Republican base strategy crossed the line and undermined Kerry as much as it boosted the president.



And finally, check out the national map of how counties voted in the presidential election. We are not a nation of Republicans in the mountain West, Midwest and South, edged by Democrats on the coasts and in the Great Lakes region. Most of the nation looks red, with a huge concentration of blue in the urban centers.

--jwpj