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Subject: my election night
I’d love to talk about poker, football or anything
else, but really, anything I’d want to say is nearly meaningless compared
to what happened last Tuesday when Barack Obama won election as the 44th
President of the United States. I woke up that day with a nervous energy,
the waiting, the painful waiting for hours for the first results to come
in, it felt like forever. I spent that afternoon being pestered by a stupid
right wing friend of mine who was busy making up various and sundry electoral
college maps that somehow gave his man McCain the win, many of these maps
had states that McCain was never going to get, like New Mexico in them.
As a quick defense in case you were worried about
why I wasn’t out and about voting, I had early voted weeks previous and
had even gotten 2 non-political co-workers to do so also, so I felt I’d
done my part to bring change to America.
Finally the first news of the day trickles in
and it’s nightmares across the board, McCain’s up in Virginia 55-44, he’s
up in Florida, he’s winning the popular vote. I am sick, I am reeling,
this just can’t be happening, how is this even possible? It’s so surreal,
I try to calm my liberal friend named Chris (we’re talking on instant messenger
on the computer, as I was with my right wing idiot friend) that it’s way
early in the results, stuff is going to turn around, but we’re both just
in a state of shock, the time creeps by, the horror mounts as we’re looking
for something, anything good to be reported, something to move things back
to the way they were supposed to be, Obama has to win this, right? Right?!
I read a post from Balloon-Juice and John Cole’s got a sense of doom about
him and drinking hard. Well everything’s working out just swimmingly, I’ve
always thought England would be a nice place to live.
Virginia and Florida begin their slow crawl backs
towards Obama, Indiana, which I have been harping on as being a hugely
important state, continues to remain in flux, I’m trying to buck up Chris,
who’s still on pins and needles. The amazing good news that PA. has fallen
without any conflict is quickly forgotten as Colorado comes out with it’s
early results and McCain again jumps out to a big lead with 1% reporting,
again this nearly breaks Chris, then it happens.
Ohio.
Ohio is called for Obama.
A weight lifts off me, it’s over, we’ve won,
the nightmare has ended, I can feel it in my bones. Victory is at hand,
it is so strange that the process must continue to play itself out, yet
at the same time intellectually I know it’s all a formality. Chris continues
to be nervous, I quickly draw up an electoral college map with basically
McCain winning everything he can win, and still losing cause he’s lost
Ohio. Chris, unmoved by reality, still waits for more. Results from states
continue to trickle in here and there, Obama takes the lead in Virginia,
the right wing friend, John, concedes the election, and hopes the Dems
don’t get 60 in the Senate.
Virginia is called by FOX News for Obama.(Fox,
while being dirt bag scum and a mouthpiece for the horrible propaganda
of the last 8 years, were spot on calling races and being the first to
do so.) Dailykos posts that McCain is expected to concede at 8PM ET/11PM
PT, Huffington Post’s headline reads “President Elect Obama” and recounts
the states he has won.
I make one last check at a few news sites to
make sure Ohio hasn’t pulled a Florida on us and gone back to grey or anything,
nope still blue.
Now it’s really over, now it’s time to let the
moment sink in. This nation, for all it’s faults, all it’s failures, all
it’s horrible mistakes, has now taken one huge step in the right direction.
I am crying. If after these last 8 years, after all the stupidity and mismanagement
of the Bush White House, after the failed wars and trashed economy and
all of it, if we didn’t have it in us as a nation to take a new direction
and elect somebody from the other party President. Well I’d have to think
that our grand experiment in democracy might just about have ended. Obama
and the Democrats had to win this one, they *HAD* to, and they did.
I spend the next few hours watching the sites,
Florida goes to Obama, Nevada, my home state, is an overwhelming landslide
for Obama, we were pegged to go to Obama by 5 points, we came in at 12,
and kicked out a Republican dirt bag and replaced him with a good liberal
woman Dina Titus who will assuredly do a better job for us then the man
she replaced.
McCain comes out and gives a concession speech
that makes us wonder where that McCain was this whole long campaign. I
really feel like he never thought he could win, and that he just told his
campaign managers to do anything they could for victory, scorched earth
was fine with him, as long as it ended in McCain getting into the White
House, it’s why he defended his horrible ad saying Obama wanted to teach
5 year olds about sex and why he picked Palin, who was a totally unqualified
ditz. With that burden off his shoulders, he was free to go back to being
something like the ‘maverick’ the media made him out to be.
Then Obama had his turn to speak, and he is truly
just so wonderful to listen to. I know Bart gets riled up about some of
the emptiness of Obama’s speeches, but really I think a lot of why he won
is that people just like him, he’s inspiring, he lifts you up when he talks,
he treats you like an adult, he is really just a dynamic person. I can
not imagine what this moment had to be like for an older black person who
had grown up in the south. A man or woman who was told they wouldn’t be
served at this counter, that they had to drink from that fountain, or go
to the back of the bus. To go from a racism so engrained that it was institutionalized
across a great section of this nation. To this moment when a black man
was elected President, it had to be beyond words. I saw Jessie Jackson
crying in the crowd awaiting Obama’s speech, say what you will about the
man and he’s made his mistakes, but he was there when Martin Luther King
Jr. was killed, he stood next to him as he fell, to be in that most horrible
of moments and then see this one. I can not imagine the impact of it.
What I can imagine is the one story my friend
tells me, and in every re-telling of it, I can not finish it without crying
, just starting to type it now has my eyes watering. It happened about
a week before the election.
My good friend and room mate Terry, who dragged
me out to Vegas five odd years ago is one of the nicest people you’ll ever
meet and he basically makes friends with everyone, one of his friends is
a co-worker who is a single mom with three kids, two from a marriage that
ended in divorce, the last child from another relationship. The youngest
child’s father is black. So Terry is playing with the kids while the news
is going on in the background, as they play whatever games they play, this
young boy, all of three and a half years old, looks at Terry and says.
“The next President is going to look like me!”
Back tomorrow with football and other stuff.
Mikethedealer@hotmail.com
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