Here it is… after all the campaigning, the speeches, the attacks and comebacks, the primaries, the local committee meetings, the blogs, the newspaper articles, the hours an hours of Morning Joe and C-Span, the worries and the reliefs of the polling… Election Day. I’m, of course, an early voter who is now waiting to see how the rest of America comes in.
Worrying about the final outcome has cost me sleep, made my poor diabetic blood sugar run high in the morning for no apparent reason, and kept me returning to rightist blogs and Fox News to see what the Republicans are doing, waiting for a last minute trick to spoil Barack’s potential win (last night alone I must have seen fifty Reverend Wright commercials by some right-wing 527… and read entry after entry in right-wing blogs that made fun of the death of Obama’s grandmother… an unimaginable set of evil jabs that I thought were beyond what Americans could do.)
The polls are still up this morning for the Democrats. Even so, Joe and Mika are debating how McCain could win, discussing Bradley Effects, Reverse Bradley Effects, Florida overthrows and all the things Pat Buchanan wants to bring up. I drink my coffee and watch the televised pictures of voter lines.
I’m teaching my long Color Class today at HCC, so I can’t do volunteer work. Mt son is working as a voting machine maintenance person in Maryland, shuffling between Williamsport and Hagerstown. He has a sixteen hour straight shift and will see a lot of Washington County, the most right-wing county in the state, voters. Elly eaches today as well… but we all voted early and we’re all worried that the outcome will shift from the last poll indications.
I went back and reviewed entries in Under The LobsterScope from November of 2004, back in the first year of this blog, when we were all excited about the possibility of getting Bush out of office. The polls on the night before had Kerry ahead with an estimated 304 electoral votes. I, like many, really believed it would come off. We didn’t know about the voting machine changes and other things that were screwing things up And in the end, we were surprised by Kerry’s loss.
But I found one line which has been the underpinning of this and so many other blogs:
Unless we start today to influence and change the country in the Congressional races of 2006, we must start TODAY. It is DAY ONE of the new campaign.
As we all know, we succeeded in 2006. Now we just have to succeed in 2008. We are not as innocently “up” as in 2004, however.
All I can say now is GET OUT AND VOTE. Vote for Democrats! Vote for Obama! I want to sleep well tonite.
