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And you're not alone. Yes, Kerry is a good politician and knew perfectly that even winning the Presidency on technicalities, at best, against a popular vote margin of the kind couldn't possibly work out well for him.
But you can see his team poring over their charts and numbers that night, all muttering: "Lordy, Rove and Reed did manage to turn out every single f-ing conservative leaner and idiot this time." And I wonder about the people who thought that Ohio and Florida wouldn't in some ways live up to their cultural reputations of embarrassing schemings or corruptions, overshadowed by some flagrantly thoughtless incompetence and indefensible sloth. They're still Ohio and Florida, folks.
As for nondiscriminatory behavior by (state) government (in election practices)- the centerpiece of our domestic argument is how seriously to take and enforce Equal Protection guarantees. Republicans are the people who by operational definition, and in explicit political distinction, don't believe in its spirit or much of its letter. How could anyone possibly expect a Republican state government to not engage in abuses of it? (Of course, they have to act in ways such that no evidence can be discovered of any outright violation- the media spotlight is too strong these days for them to survive any real exposure. Hence their wierd glee at any election they win legitimately.)
The level of denial enforced around here is pretty amazing. Personally, I don't see why no one notices the moral victory and cultural victory within the Kerry voting, and how terribly hamstrung a Presidency- how close it is to abject partisan failure- it is that Bush is about to begin if Democrats just work to keep their 48% together. And if you look at what Bush voters want from Bush, it is either in effect to do nothing or to fix up things as Kerry intended to, while the leadership elite wants all kinds of relatively radical crap that puts a hole through the bottom of the ship of state immediately. Dubya's still recapitulating his father's Presidency, but now it's the misere/decline part of late 1991 and 1992- pressure to raise taxes, go for detente in the Middle East, and his Party going into schism as the economy bottoms out and the culture brushes off the Religious Right as wackos.
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