Post Election Wrap

First, and I feel I need to get this off my chest: Boo-ya!  Take that, Per­ma­nent Repub­li­can Major­ity.  In your face.

Okay, thanks.

We watched CNN most of the night last night, except for one period of time between when they called Ohio and they called the Pres­i­dency, when the CNN pun­dits clearly knew Obama had won, but were not being allowed to say so.  Most salient dur­ing this period was when John King tried to show how McCain couldn’t win by giv­ing him every sin­gle state left in the Union and show­ing how it didn’t add up to 270, when instead he could have just added Cal­i­for­nia, Ore­gon, and Wash­ing­ton to Obama’s total and shown how he had more than 270.  I got so irri­tated by this (I actu­ally felt insulted by them) that I switched to ABC’s cov­er­age for half an hour or so.

But dur­ing our stay with ABC we only got to hear Cokie Roberts once, and George Will less than that, and frankly, see­ing George and Char­lie and Diane each at their Com­mand Sta­tion™ made me yearn for CNN’s crowded Island of Opin­ion™, so we went back.

One of the best cov­er­age com­ments of the night came from James Poniewozik on Time’s live­blog of the event, “God, switch­ing over from the fran­tic cable news to Shields and Lehrer con­vers­ing on PBS is like lis­ten­ing to the Ents talk in The Lord of the Rings. Pon­tif­i­cate faster!”

From stuff I’ve read, it seems none of the Nets had the cojones to call it ear­lier than the poll clos­ings on the West Coast.  Which I guess is okay, given the need to get vot­ers out for Prop 8 in Cal­i­for­nia.  But really, every­one with half a brain and ele­men­tary math knew it was over.  The Time live­blog noted the lack of a Tim Russert, a Big Dog, as they char­ac­ter­ized him, able to buck the con­ven­tions and call it early.  RIP, Tim Russert.

As for what I thought (beyond my pithy one-liner at the top of this post), I had a cou­ple of very ran­dom thoughts as I got ready for bed last night.  I Twit­tered one of them, but I’d like to expand on it a little.

My boys are 2 and 5.  The two-year-old sees Obama signs in yards (and on my chest) and declares “Rock Obama!”  But the five-year-old under­stands enough to know that Mommy and Daddy were eager to see Barack Obama win.  For my birth­day he drew me a pic­ture of Barack Obama (in a rocket, I think, I’ll have to find it and post it).  He was happy this morn­ing when I whis­pered to him who had won, and gave him a great big hug.  But who am I kid­ding, he doesn’t know what the Hell is going on.  But I do.  I know that he will grow up in a world where black men (men, I real­ize, not women) know that they can be President.

The world is bet­ter.  In a small, tiny way, I have made it bet­ter.  For my chil­dren. Damn.

Then, as I was falling asleep, I thought to myself, what is Obama going to do with his web site?  Will the White House site be turned in to a bully pul­pit like barackobama.com?  That would be all kinds of awe­some.  All kinds.