The People Have Spoken

I'm declaring an official end to the licking of political wounds here. I'm not asking for "the healing" or some form of associated tripe. I'm just asking to get on with it. As tired as I had become of the pre-election nastiness after several months, I'm tired of this post-election sniveling even more after only four days. Fact is, the guy I wanted more than the other guy wasn't as popular. Our weird little political system boils down to a popularity contest (we can hope that popularity is based on ideas and policy, but there's no requirement that it is), and the person I wasn't pulling for was more popular. Whatever anyone thinks of how he got in the first time, a majority wants to keep him. There may have been some irregularities in the voting, but the Republicans did not beam down 51% of the electorate from Pluto. I may not understand why, but people out there like Bush. Most of them aren't stupid (yes, there are idiots on both sides); they have different priorities than I do and different ways of coming to a decision. Again, there are no regulations how a voter comes to his or her decision. However it happens, it happened, and that's the way it is.

Here's an interesting commentary in Salon (requires paid subscription or 15 seconds of your time to watch an ad) discussing why Kerry supporters were so surprised Bush won. We all get the impression that our guy is going to win because we travel in circles of people who believe like we do. Since we don't have contact people with differing opinions in our daily lives, and tend to stick to reading material that reinforces our views rather than challenging them, we get the impression that everyone must agree with us, which is not the case (on either side--a 3 million vote margin in a country with an overall population of 294 million is enough to give Bush a majority of the vote, but hardly adds up to universal support).

A side note: both sides got nasty these past few months. Larry, I agree that a 12-year-old punching a cardboard Kerry and expressing homicidal urges toward a sitting senator does not reflect well on the character of Bush supporters. On the other hand, in the past couple weeks, I saw at least five defaced Bush-Cheney signs. Nary a defaced Kerry-Edwards sign to be found. Presuming that the defacement was from actual Kerry-Edwards supporters and not the brainchild of someone wanting to portray Kerry-Edwards supporters as childish vandals, that doesn't exactly speak well of them, either.