Wednesday, November 5, 2008

We Don't Have a Winner! (Yet!)

Obama is currently at 349 electoral votes with North Carolina (15 votes) and Missouri (11) still to be allocated. So he'll wind up with either 349, 360, 364 or 375.

If he winds up with 349, I win...and so do about eight people who guessed the same thing I did but since they were just copying me, no credit.

If he winds up with 360...well, that was one of those numbers that struck me as possible but which no one guessed. The closest was Mark Jarek with 359.

If he winds up with 364, which is looking likely...we had about fifty of those. The first one received was Richard Bensam and I'll also mention the next ten: Michael Kilgore, Kris Mandt, Cory Strode, Corey de Danann, Tony Thomas, Roger Green, Bill O'Brien, Michael Hagan, Bob Claster and Anand Kandaswamy.

And if Obama gets 375...well, the first one in with that number was Michael Hagan but he changed his guess to 364 and as per our rules, his last guess counts. So the next person to guess 375 was Chuck Sigars, whose guess was received about two minutes before I got one from Charles Christopherson that also guessed 375. Ten others guessed 375, not counting one other who guessed that then changed to a lower number.

For what it's worth, over a hundred of you guessed 311 and almost as many guessed 338. Leaving aside joke guesses like 3 and 538, the lowest number guessed was 150 and the highest was 487.

Forty-eight people (out of about 1300 guesses) had Obama below 270. Ten or so wrote that they were hopeful he wouldn't win. Six said they wanted him to win but expected massive vote stealing and fraud. The rest were without comment.

I'll be back to crown our winner when we know for sure.

• Posted at 3:02 PM · LINK

Lastly for Now...

One last comment and then I have to get back to work-type stuff. We all have our personal causes which we'd like to think were advanced by the election results. One of mine is that sleazy campaigning and the demonization of the opposition shouldn't work and we should celebrate when it doesn't. I'm not well enough versed in North Carolina politics to know why Kay Hagan was able to unseat Elizabeth Dole but I'd sure like to think that Dole commercial — the one where a Hagan impersonator shouted, "There is no God!" — had a lot to do with it. It would be nice to think Obama's win had a lot to do with people simply not buying the idea that he was this secret Socialist or Communist who was out to take Joe the Plumber's great wealth and redistribute it to the poor.

For reasons I may write about in the next day or three, I doubt that Sarah Palin has much future in elected office and will instead opt to become the Oprah Winfrey of the Fox News crowd...and maybe even on Fox News. But whether she runs again or not, some friend's going to have to caution her about making divisive, arrogant comments about how the people who support her are the "real Americans," as she did in Guilford County, North Carolina. The "real Americans" of Guilford County gave 58.75% of their vote last night to Obama-Biden and only 40.44% to McCain-Palin.

• Posted at 10:34 AM · LINK

A Little Later...

And now, all the news sources seem to be calling Proposition 8 as having passed.

I'm always suspicious of those day-after statements where the folks who lose declare some sort of circuitous victory. I'm sure there are Conservative sites and talk shows where, even as we speak, it's being explained that Obama's victory is the best thing that could have happened to the Republican party and that Democrats will rue this day. You always have to ask yourself if they would have said the opposite if the vote had gone the other way. Does anyone ever say, "We'll regret our victory!"?

Still, we all know that same-sex marriage ain't going away as an issue...just as the controversy wouldn't disappear completely if the vote had been 52-48 in the other direction. It lost again but incrementally, it seems to be losing by a smaller and smaller margin — and be backed by younger and younger voters — with each skirmish. So while I don't think this is a victory in any way, I also don't think it's a long-term victory. Just maybe until the next election or, at worst, the one after.

In other news: Some news outlets have awarded Indiana's 11 votes to Obama, putting him at 349. Still looks like he may get Missouri and/or North Carolina.

• Posted at 10:11 AM · LINK

The Morning After

How things change overnight. When I went to bed, Obama was at 338 electoral votes with Indiana, Missouri and North Carolina still dangling...Al Franken was in a squeaker with Norm Coleman in Minnesota...and California's Proposition 8 was leading but still too close to call. And now here we are in the cold, clear morning and Obama is at 338 electoral votes with Indiana, Missouri and North Carolina still dangling...Al Franken is in a squeaker with Norm Coleman in Minnesota...and California's Proposition 8 is leading but still too close to call.

Obviously, Obama's exact electoral total doesn't matter a lot except to those of us who have predictions on the line. If he wins either Indiana or Missouri but not both and not North Carolina, he'd be at my number, 349. I think I'm going to be low here. We'll announce our winner-of-nothing when things settle down.

The last hour before I turned in, Franken and Coleman were truly neck and neck: Franken was up 600, then Coleman was up 1200, then it was Franken by 800, then Coleman. That was on the Talking Points Memo site. Sometimes, I'd peek over at cnn.com and I guess they were getting their numbers in a different order because when Franken was up on one site, Coleman was leading at the other...but both sites said they had identical percentages of precincts reporting. It must have been Roller Coaster Time at the candidates' respective headquarters.

Apparently, a resolution of that race will hinge on a recount. I've met Franken a few times and he seems like a smart, serious guy with a real determination to take on the sleazier conventions of Washington such as lobbyists and tainted money. Coleman's recent legal problems suggest he's typical of the kind of thing Franken stands against so I hope Al prevails. Then again, it might be fun to see Coleman win and then have to stand investigation and trial.

If Proposition 8 indeed passes here, it would be the one real negative of the election for me. I still think gay marriage is not an "if" but a "when"...and this is another example of how lives are harmed and resources are wasted while we postpone the inevitable. Same-sex couples are going to get their full marriage rights some day...why not now? It's not just the 16,000-18,000 couples who were wed and now must endure legal challenges and debates about their lives. It's that the state is still officially making all gays into second-class citizens.

Yesterday afternoon, I was over at Cedars-Sinai for a routine checkup. As I was leaving, I was stopped politely by two women...and I think they said their names were Lynn and Stef. They explained quickly and nervously that they were a married couple and they were approaching as many people as possible, urging them to make sure to vote against Proposition 8. They've been together for almost twenty years, love each other dearly and as one put it, "We aren't hurting anyone but discrimination is hurting us."

Analogies that compare gay rights to the struggles for racial and gender equality are not always fair. In this case though, the arguments that civil unions are "just as good" sure sound to me like that senator who once said that coloreds weren't getting discriminated against. After all, they have their own water fountains and the water's the same in them.

I understand that some people honestly fear that allowing gay marriage is a "loss" for their religion or that it's emblematic of some sort of moral degradation and they feel the need to push back. But I wish those who feel that way strongly enough to back things like Proposition 8 could meet a few more people like those two ladies outside the hospital yesterday. I think a lot of them would be hard-pressed to see same-sex unions as a threat; not if they had to explain that to Lynn and Stef.

• Posted at 8:55 AM · LINK

November 6, 2008 • Current • November 4, 2008