November 7, 2008
Like many people, this has been an emotional week and it's been difficult to write a post until now. I'm sure everyone's nearly stuffed full of the postmortem analysis, but I still want to write about the election results.
The good. Obama won in an electoral landslide and his tide of dreams swept clean many Congressional seats, which promises hope that the US can pull out of the dark ages of the last eight years. Or maybe the dark ages have been going on much longer. Thomas Friedman pointed out that the American Civil War began in Virginia 174 years ago and, in many ways, ended there on Tuesday. Overstated, but inspiring. Notably for the record turnout, especially among minorities.
The bad. Idaho politics didn't shake the narrow-minded conservatism that bogs down political life here, except in two cases. 1) Voters from four districts that form the core of Boise (including the district in which I live) enabled a sweep for their democratic state legislators. 2) Idaho will be sending one democrat to the House in Washington. He's a true "Idaho democrat," which means he'd be a republican in almost any other state, but still, Idahoans did actually elect a democrat.
The ugly. California, Florida and Arizona approved anti-marriage ballot measures, which undermines the concept of marriage (and the legal protection it provides) by limiting who can and can't be married. According to exit polls (which Nate Silver tells me to distrust) the bulk of racial minorities voted for these hateful measures. If so, it is baffling how, in one day, progress can be made for racial minorities and those same minorities can simultaneously beat up on another minority. But, by far, the ugliest result on Tuesday was the Arkansas' anti-child ballot measure, which hurt orphans by reducing the number of loving homes to which they could otherwise belong.
In the end, maybe Benjamin Franklin said it best, "Democracy is two wolves and one sheep deciding on what to have for dinner."
