Easing Back In

Last night was spent in vegetation, recuperation, and gathering information. Like an amnesia victim, there are permanent gaps, as I will never ever ever recover the thousands of tweets, posts, and Facebook messgaes I missed between Monday morning and Wednesday night. But the brain is now ready to return to matters at hand.

 The community is already turning to the next three things: the February 5 Iowa City school funding vote, justice center do-over and the replacement of the irreplaceable Rep.-Elect Sally Stutsman (I like saying that) on the Board of Supervisors. So my new boss Travis Weipert will get good experience right away. Advice: Mike Mauro knew how to run elections.

Big picture take is that the geographic and demographic change that we first saw in 2008 are now permanent features, and that 2008 will join 1968, 1932, 1896 and 1860 as what the political scientists call "realigning elections." Countertrend factoid that I forgot to source: In West Virginia, once so Democratic that it Dukakis `88, Mitt Romney carried every county. Either they really like Massachusetts governors or they have another issue:


Related: Students Clash After Election but this isn't what Joe Strummer meant: Tuesday night "hundreds of Ole Miss students exchanged racial epithets and violent,politicized chants in response to the announcement of the re-election of President Barack Obama. What began as an argument around midnight quickly spread across campus."

But at least Joe had a song for it:


America, even Texas, is getting blacker and browner and pinker and more rainbow-colored - witness four marriage-equality wins, the survival of David Wiggins, the election of Senator Tammy Baldwin - and the GOP can choose: Adapt or go the way of the Know-Nothings.




In any event, here's a smart take from the Atlantic's Andrew Cohen:

No serious political party in America -- no legitimate party in any viable democracy -- can win an election by suppressing votes. So long as the Republican Party endorses (and enacts) voting laws designed to make it harder for registered voters to vote, so long as Republican officials like Ohio's Jon Husted contort themselves to interpret those laws in a restrictive fashion, the Republicans will continue to play a loser's game. That's my theory, anyway, and I'm sticking to it. Having covered for the past two years the voting rights front in this epic election cycle, I have come to believe that the Republicans will begin to win presidential elections again only when they start competing for votes with the substance of their ideas.