The Other Shoe

This is how America voted in the Presidential election of 2004, county by county. Red, of course is Bush while blue is Kerry.

It's funny, isn't it, how from this perspective America doesn't look so deeply divided.

Map via Sean Hannity...which reminds me of my drive home on Election Day.

My drive home from work usually takes 35 to 40 minutes. On Election Day, my plan was to vote after work. No early voting for this guy...I enjoy visiting my old elementary school, now my polling place, far too much.

Much to my chagrin, the weather Tuesday afternoon was terrible. Rain. Lots of rain. Lots of fender benders due to the slick roads. My short commute was transformed into an eighty minute white-knuckle pain in the yarbles. En route, for reasons unknown, I listened to Sean Hannity for the first time. Not too bad, but by the time I got to Bruce Shulkey Elementary he had me convinced that Bush was in trouble. Real trouble.

He said, basically, "Folks, he said, if you believe in what this President is doing, he needs you. He needs you now, to go vote. Your President needs you."

Apparently, Hannity had been filled in on the faulty exit polling and thought that Bush was gonna lose. He almost had me convinced that Bush's goose was cooked despite my prediction...

WIth 0% of precincts reporting, The Other Shoe is projecting that Bush will win re-election with 52% of the vote.

...of last January. (January! Amazing!!....ed.)[ Naah, just all in a day's work.]  A point high, we now know, and I totally blew the Howard Dean run-as-an-independent prediction, but still. And I predicted that the Democratic ticket would be Kerry-Edwards long before it actually came to pass (breaking arm patting self on back). Anyway, after that anti-pep talkfrom Hannity I voted with an unsteady hand.

On my drive home from the school I heard some local talk show guys discuss how Kerry had been effective in bringing out his base and capturing the majority of the undecideds and what a brilliant strategic move bringing in John Edwards had been. I couldn't believe my ears. I couldn't believe that I had been so wrong about what would happen.

And then the returns started coming in and the exit polls turned out to have been wrong. Again. I turned in after midnight and was up at 5:30 the next morning whereupon I discovered that the election was still in doubt, that in a 3:00 a.m speech Edwards had spoken of fighting on, and on and on, the Florida scenario all over again.

Incredible.

And so it went until Kerry finally conceded.

Life returned to normal.

Normal being a relative term.

-posted by Charlie Eklund 

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