apple juice

Well, Kerry just gave his concession speech, Bush is supposed to be on soon.

I’m pretty worn out from my volunteering yesterday. I knocked on about 450 doors in 11 hours yesterday. It was tiring but satisfying. Basically I just asked if they had voted, and if they knew where their polling place was, and told them how to register if they weren’t registered.

I haven’t had any free moments yet to gather together the obviously disapointing result. But I did read Joshua Marshall’s thoughts, and I think that they are worthy of sharing.

In some ways this would all be conceptually easier for Democrats to deal with if President Bush had managed a realignment of our politics in the post-9/11 world. But when I look at the results from last night what I see is that they are virtually identical to four years ago. Pretty much the same states going each way and a very close to even race — though of course the president’s 51% makes all the difference in the world.

As I said, if the Dems had been crushed, that would be one thing. If the American people were coalescing away from them, etc. But that’s not what has happened here. In 2000 the country was divided into two (increasingly hostile) camps. And it’s still exactly the same way. If anything it seems only more entrenched — perhaps symbolically and geographically captured by the flip between New Hampshire and New Mexico from 2000.

Read the full post, it’s well worth it.

I’ll post some more thoughts soon… and my list of possible countries to move to. 😉