Sine Qua Non

The Morning After

Hey! Bush won! But the heaping wads of cash I wished for still haven’t shown up. I bet you thought I was wishing for a Bush victory yesterday when I blew out the candles -- and you would lose. I was wishing for great wads of cash to be dropped on my doorstep since I was quite confident that Bush was already going to win. No use wasting a birthday wish on something that will already happen.

As of this morning, President Bush has 51.55568% of the popular vote and Senator Kerry has 48.44431%. I can’t help but wonder that if the numbers were reversed Big Media would be rounding the larger number to 52% instead of truncating it to 51%. I predicted a 52% vote total to Bush. With rounding, which is normal in these instances, I declare that prediction a success.

Over at Ipse Dixit I also predicted that Bush would get 312 electoral votes, and that the GOP would pick up 3 Senate seats and 6 seats in the House. With respect to the electoral vote, the total now seems to be closer to 286. I was wrong about New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. With respect to the Senate, it looks like the GOP will pick up 6 seats (DeMint, Burr, Isakson, Martinez, Vitter, Thune ) while losing 2 seats (Obama, Salazar) for a net gain of 4. I expected Murkowski to lose. Unfortunately, with the rules of the Senate, not much will change. With respect to the House, it is still too early to tell, but I feel comfortable with my estimate of a GOP pickup of 6 seats. All told, this tells me that I was being fairly realistic in my outlook based upon my filters of all the news and polls.

Before 8:00 PM I thought that the exit polls were crap. Strangely enough, I didn’t know about the exit poll predictions until about 7:00 PM. I had been out of the house and not on the ‘net so I didn’t know about Drudge or anyone else posting the bogus exit polls. But it does explain the early evening depression on Fox, except, of course, for Juan Williams, who got a lot quieter as the evening wore on. As I predicted then, the exit polls will become another Big Media scandal in the coming days.

And yet another prediction I made last week came true. Every “heartland” state went for President Bush.

Transnational Progressivism’s victory party has been deferred, but the battle will rage on.

I predict blogosphere hits will drop precipitously in the coming weeks. But blogs are here to stay.

I saw Wonkette for the first time while flipping channels last night. She appear to be nothing more than a flippant poseur who wouldn’t get the time of day from Big Media (or Big Blogosphere) if she looked like Helen Thomas and didn’t talk about sex.

As a thought experiment, imagine how badly John Kerry would have lost without the 5% boost from Big Media that Evan Thomas suggested. You’d be a fool to imagine that this Big Media bonus will now go away.

Megan McArdle says:

THINGS ARE LOOKING BAD FOR TOM DASCHLE IN SOUTH DAKOTA. I confess I don't understand the obsession that led to pouring $25 million into the state to defeat a rather moderate minority leader, but this will be a big scalp for the Republicans.

Megan is very smart, but maybe the lack of sleep was clouding her judgment on this one. Aside from the obvious advantage of taking down the leader of the other party, the number of truly contested Senate seats is small in every election, so if you can flip one, that justifies the expense.

And while I’m commenting on Instapundit guest contributors, there's also this from Ann Althouse:

Here in Madison, I'm surrounded by overwhelming numbers of people who voted against the President and must be horrified at the prospect of four more years. I was just saying yesterday afternoon, as I was reading the exit polls that so favored Kerry, that it might be better for the national psyche, at least, if Kerry won, that it would be much harder for Kerry supporters to tolerate more Bush than for Bush supporters to accept giving the other party a chance for a while. But, despite some lingering denial among Kerry supporters (including some MSM outlets), that is not to be. Those of us who are happy with the outcome would do well to resist gloating. There is a lot of pain out there, and perhaps setting an example of graceful winning can help inspire some graceful acceptance of loss.

Oh please. I do agree that we should be graceful winners, but people that are horrified by the thought of four more years of Bush need to grow up or seek some professional help. Frankly, I don’t give a damn about their self esteem. I wouldn’t have liked it if Kerry had won, but I wasn’t promising to leave the country if he won. Whatever happened to the virtues of putting up the good fight and then accepting the outcome? The infantile behavior and underlying thought patterns of the Angry Left that drive them do not deserve kid gloves and sympathy. I’m happy about the outcome and I’m not gloating. Sure, there are some who positively revel in the schadenfreude today, but that’s nothing compared to what those of us who are happy today would have been subjected to had the result gone the other way. Oh, and I feel the same way about Europe.

Primary benefits of President Bush’s reelection:

1. The malignant malevolence of the political malefactor Terry McAuliffe should be become a thing of the past. If I were a Republican, I’d wish him to stay considering his track record. As it happens, I am not a Republican, so I’d rather the adults retake control of the Democrat Party. My support of President Bush had a lot more to do with a concern over the election of John Kerry than any strong belief that George W. Bush is a great president. Having said that, President Bush is much better on the War on Terrorism than he is generally given credit for. The negativity surrounding the reportage of Iraq is just ridiculous. Events on the ground are much better than anyone expected before we went in – and that’s a fact. Maybe now the saner heads in the Democrat Party can stop wishing for bad things to happen just to make President Bush look bad. Maybe Mr. McAuliffe can open up an You're Doomed! consultancy with Bob Shrum.

2. Chief Justice Rehnquist can safely retire now and relax for his remaining years. The same is true of Justice Stevens and Justice O’Conner.

3. The days are now numbered for the scum of Fallujah. Did anybody else see the live feed of our troops watching Fox News from Fallujah last night? Who knew we had troops who could sit and watch TV in Fallujah? Isn't Fallujah supposed to be a lawless encampment that we cannot enter?

4. North Korea and Iran (the remaining members of the Axis of Evil) just received their wake up call.

5. Maybe Andrew Sullivan will stop exhibiting the symptoms of bipolar punditry, with all its higher than high highs and lower than low lows. Andrew is bright, talented and perceptive, but his wild mood swings do not do him justice.

6. After his concession speech we may never have to hear Senator Kerry's monotone, sonorous platitudes again.

7. The silly, and I do mean silly, talk about dispensing with the electoral college will subside for a while. Anybody who thinks the electoral college is going away either hasn't read the U.S. Constitution or they didn't understand it when they did read it.

8. All the meaningless, nonsensical coincidences that are offered up as predictive correlations, if not causal agents, for presidential election results can be put to rest, e.g., the Washington Redskin's final home game result before the election.

9. Ron Reagan should retire from public life. Ron, trust me, your friends on the Left find your commentary as uninformed and your politics as juvenile as I do. Now that the warm glowing warming glow of having Ronald Reagan's son dis his political heirs has worn off, they'll be taking your microphone away because you are embarrassing even them.

10. Political polling has become almost hopelessly disreputable.

11. Sean Puffy P. Diddy Daddy Combs can go back to whatever he was doing before his Big Media hyped power grab to become the hip-hop political power broker. So, with the absence of the youth vote, how many people died Diddy Daddy?

And now, back to life...

DOWNDATE: I added a couple more benefits that slipped my mind earlier.

Posted by Charles Austin at November 3, 2004 11:09 AM