Wednesday, November 5, 2008

Thoughts the day after the 2008 election

Overall, I'm pretty happy with the results. The situation of Obama with the Presidency but the Democrats lacking a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate was the ideal result for me. While final tallies still need to be calculated, it looks like the Democrats will not have 60 in the Senate.

Here at Boston University students on the whole seemed to be very happy. They spent more time drunkenly screaming "Obama!" at the top of their lungs than actually sitting down and watching the ongoing returns in the House and Senate. And they kept screaming until about 2 AM when sane people were trying to sleep. I must wonder if they were plants sent by the Republican party to make people so annoyed with Obama that they won't vote for him in 2012.

Now as to specific elections: I'm disappointed at Chris Shays' defeat since he is a moderate Republican and it seems that people voted against him primarily for reasons that had little to do with his voting record. I'm appalled that Ted Stevens won despite his recent convictions. Really Alaska, haven't you been made fun of enough in the last year? Finally, as of right now, it looks like California's Proposition 8 passed which is unfortunate. My ideal is to have no legal recognition of any marriages but, if we are going to be recognizing some, we should recognize all of them.

Specific pieces I recommend reading: My twin has a piece up on the Huffington Post discussing McCain and Obama's respective final speeches. Mark Chu-Carroll has a piece up which discusses his personal views and raises interesting points about how statistics are reported during elections. Orac presents some worrying evidence that an Obama administration may not be as pro-science as many hoped. Razib Khan over at Gene Expression has as usual a variety of interesting posts with good analysis of data to back them up. There's a piece in Commentary's blogs by Abe Greenwald suggesting that the Republicans did not do anything wrong this election. Then people should immediately read Ramesh Ponnuru's response.

One final note: As I was writing this piece I noticed that this version of Firefox does not have "Obama" in the default list for the spellchecker. I presume that will not be the case for future versions.

6 comments:

Khagan Din said...

You know, you're getting better at writing cautiously--I'm losing the urge to nitpick your exaggerations and generalizations.

Joshua said...

Oh by all means keep doing so. I'd much rather have someone tell me when I'm wrong then leave me ignorant.

Anonymous said...

Josh, I didn't realize that you have such a dry sence of humor. I enjoyed reading you article very much. Keep it up.

Aaron Zelinsky said...

"Really, Alaska, haven't you been made fun of enough this year?" might just be my favorite piece of post-election coverage.

In fairness, I think the race is still running very close, but it does look like Stevens is going to pull it out as of now.

rp2knight said...

Have you seen Minnesota Senate? The margin is at 338 (as of Tuesday) with 2.9 million votes. If only I was old enough to be able to vote there...

(P.S. fivethirtyeight says that Alaska isn't over yet, as there are at least around 50000 absentee ballots uncounted, and even then, there would be a 14% drop in participation from 2004. I smell a rat.

Joshua said...

Erick, I'm not at all convinced that there was anything shady going on although there certainly might be. Fivethirtyeight has an interesting post on that matter:

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/11/what-in-hell-happened-in-alaska.html