Where’s my bat?

“and if Kerry loses, adviser Bob Shrum, who, in essence, said the public was too stupid to understand Kerry's accomplishments, should be strung up by his balls and batted around like a pinata by the Democratic party leadership until he bursts open and showers everyone with his innards”

— The Rude Pundit, 27 Oct 2004

This year’s Florida

As of right now, Bush is leading Kerry in Ohio by about 102,000 votes. (According to the BBC’s fancy flash map, which takes its data from the AP.) That lead was as high as 160,000 not too long ago.

According to various sources cited in this thread on Kevin Drum’s blog, there are somewhere between 140,000 and 250,000 provisional ballots in Ohio, which won’t be counted for more than a week.

Kerry needs Ohio and Michigan and Wisconsin to win; he’s currently leading in the latter two, but only just barely in Wisconsin. If Bush takes Ohio and any one other state, he wins.

Kerry must feel like he’s three games behind in the playoffs.

Schadenfreude

Has everyone here seen the ad comparing video footage of Dubya’s 1994 gubernatorial debate performance with his embarrassing gasping and stuttering this year? The ad suggests some kind of mental disorder; I think it’s just the stress of a job too tough for the poor little halfwit.

Whatever the cause, it’s likely to get worse, not better, over the next four years. I look forward to seeing the babbling idiot unable to handle even the pre-scripted faux-press conferences his keepers will be arranging for him by 2008.

(Yeah, I’ve skipped the mopey phase and gone straight to bitter and angry.)

Bully!

Bull Moose blog:

The issue for donkey is neither moving to the right nor to the left. The Democrats have the opportunity to become the true reform party. It is not as if Bush won on a positive mandate. His main message was "vote for me or they will kill you." With an increasingly ossified Republican establishment now fully in control of Washington, Democrats can truly become the insurgent party advocating fundamental reform in political and governmental institutions on behalf of the middle-class. It might be helpful to consult the old Gingrich playbook on how a minority party can seize power. Yes, the Republicans back then had voter mobilization, but they also were a party of ideas and seized the reform agenda.

1968

A lot of people seem to have decided that it was gay marriage that handed Bush four more years. Maybe yes, maybe no, maybe maybe. There’s a real danger now that Democrats will start blaming gays for the Bush victory. Not the same way we blame Nader for 2000, but in a hectoring sort of way: We told you to wait twenty or thirty years for lasting social change to work its way through state legislatures, not rush into a judicial solution. Now see what you’ve done! Don’t.

We’ve been through a similar strait before. Up until the ’60s, the South pretty much belonged to the Democratic Party’s conservative wing. In 1964, when LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act into law, he knew it’d cost his party the South. He even said to one of his aides, as he signed it, “We have just lost the South for a generation,” and he was right. Barry Goldwater appealed to southern bigots with his “southern strategy” and took a big chunk of the deep south, his own home state, and no other states. In 1968 the south all went either Republican or American Independent.

Did Johnson make a mistake? No. He was faced with a clear moral decision — between political expediency and racial justice — and made the right choice. Those justices in Massachusetts made the right choice too.

Shorter NY Times anonynous editorial

Let’s try licking their boots again. This time they might not take it as a sign of weakness.