Well...

The sun is bright, but I see a lot of haze out there. The car horns are louder than the birds, who seem to have all flown away. I guess that means Shrub will probably win if Ohio's vote is finally counted. He's already doing the full-court media press to declare victory preemptively. At least this time Kerry isn't pulling a Gore and conceding prematurely.

If it turns out that way (leave it to Ohio to be Florida this time), there were a couple of factors. Turnout, while heavy, did not reach the levels that were projected yesterday morning. Advantage, Republicans. The current demographics in the South also favor them. It'll be real difficult for a Democrat to win nationally without at least picking off one southern state, especially since the Gore states from 2000 have 10 fewer electoral votes between them since reapportionment was done.

Should the Republicans hold on, it's time for the Democrats to take a page out of their playbook. One of the things that helped them make their initial takeover of Congress possible in 1994 was their unity. Especially in the Senate, where a small bloc that unites can make a real difference. So it's time for the Democrats tot get serious about acting as a party and not let anything pass. No laws of any significance. No judges, especially not for the Supreme Court. Nothing.

Bottle things up well enough, and the party in power gets blamed.

As for what this says about us as a people, I'm frankly disgusted by it. We ought to spin off all the contiguous red states as a separate country and let them have their no tax pro-war theocracy. Reboot the whole damned thing and start over. At my BNUG board meeting last night, we were all talking politics. There's a couple of conservatives in the group, a couple of liberals, and mainly centrists - most of the group supported Kerry and a couple Bush. We had some good debating among ourselves, but I pointed out that compared to the average person, we were way over at the right side of the intelligence bell curve. Most people are stupid, and that's part of why the Republican appeals work. Most Americans still think that Saddam had something to do with 9/11. A significant number believe in creationism. They're morons, and GWB is the perfect president for morons.

The only thing I'm glad of is that for the most part, my friends who supported Bush for one reason or another lived in states where they had no statistical effect on the outcome at all. So I can still speak to them and keep a relatively clear conscience.