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Obama Wins Four More Years (303 - 206)
NEW YORK -- President Barack Obama did not just win reelection tonight. His victory signaled the irreversible triumph of a new, 21st-century America: multiracial, multi-ethnic, global in outlook and moving beyond centuries of racial, sexual, marital and religious tradition.
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The Republican Party, by contrast, has been reduced to a rump parliament of Caucasian traditionalism: white, married, church-going -- to oversimplify only slightly. "It's a catastrophe," said GOP strategist Steve Schmidt. "This is, this will have to be, the last time that the Republican Party tries to win this way."
-- Howard Fineman
I went to bed early last night. What happened?
The quote above is obviously the buoyant take on events, but let's ride on that high. I am afraid, though, that the Republicans are not going to take Steve Schmidt's lesson from their debacle, but will only rail against the supposedly liberal media all the harder, as well as fulminate against the bottom 47%. I believe they have seen the light, and it is a strange admixture of Jesus and Ayn Rand and white supremacy, and they probably were not converted by the trauma of losing so big even as they thought they had won it, with some, including even-temepered George Will, believing that Romney was going to win in a landslide.
I feel good about Obama's victory, but I do not expect the future to be easier going than the past has been. I am pretty sure that we are still a country divided, and that the right-wing Red Staters are only more angry and disturbed. I hope they upgrade Obama's security.
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NBC News has called the 2012 presidential election for President Obama. So has Fox News.
After both networks called Ohio for Obama, they brought the gavel down on 2012. Virginia, Nevada and Florida were still to be called, according to Fox, but Mitt Romney’s last path to 270 electoral votes was gone.
Lead Fox anchor Chris Wallace, however, soon went on-air to say Fox may have made a too-early call: “The Romney camp has real doubts about the call made by us.”
Top Republican strategist Karl Rove said, “This is premature.”
Then, in a bit of Must See TV, then Fox gets the jitters. Anchor Megyn Kelly was dispatched a couple floors away — or somewhere — LIVE to interview Fox’s own “Decision Desk” – the network’s own in-house numbers crunchers.
“We are quite comfortable” with our call on Ohio, The Desk told Kelly. And they didn’t back down from Rove.
Now THIS is compelling live TV.
-- SF Gate (http://blog.sfgate.com/nov05election/2012/11/06/nbc-fox-news-call-election-for-obama/)
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-- First Read (http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2012/11/the-republican-minority-has-arrived.html)
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-- Rush Limbaugh (http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2012/11/q.html)
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Shortly after midnight, angry students gathered outside the campus for a protest, which reportedly turned violent, with students throwing rocks, using racial slurs, and burning Obama's campaign signs, according to the Clarion Ledger.
Police were able to quickly break up the disturbance.
Ironically, prior to Tuesday night, conservative bloggers had warned of plots by black youth to riot if Obama lost the election, a charge that police dismissed.
-- BuzzFeed (http://www.buzzfeed.com/johnstanton/university-of-mississippi-students-riot-over-obama)
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[...]
Setting aside the policy issues we're facing over the next four years, I think the most immediate need is for Americans to find a way to live civilly with each other. "This American Life" brought on a pair of writers, liberal Phil Neisser and conservative Jacob Hess, who've written a book ("You're Not as Crazy as I Thought (But You're Still Wrong)") about their efforts to find a way to talk to each other and agree to disagree on fundamental philosophical and moral issues. There need to be a lot more similar efforts along these lines. This election has put Barack Obama back in office, and returned him a Democratic Senate and a Republican House. Over the next four years, legislative battles are going to continue to be savage and hard-fought. Neither conservatives nor liberals are going to change their minds en masse about fundamental issues of political philosophy. The top priority is for Americans to figure out a way to keep these divisions from dividing the country into two hostile armed camps that are incapable of talking to each other.
-- "The Economist" Magazine (http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2012/11/barack-obamas-re-election)
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"What happened? A political narcissistic sociopath leveraged fear and ignorance with a campaign marked by mendacity and malice rather than a mandate for resurgence and reform. Instead of using his high office to articulate a vision for our future, Obama used it as a vehicle for character assassination, replete with unrelenting and destructive distortion, derision, and division."
-- Mary Matalin (http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2012/11/hewitt-award-nominee-1.html)
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-- Andrew Sullivan (http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2012/11/the-sound-of-the-atom-splitting.html)
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Video (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/08/jon-stewart-fox-news-election-meltdown-video_n_2092224.html)
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-- Ann Coulter
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[F]or all the punditry about a coming Republican civil war, it’s not clear that the party really wants to change in any serious way — or that it could change if it wanted to. Even GOP elites, while concerned that winnable races are being sacrificed on the altar of extremism, suggest that the party is likely to stay the course that worked in 2010. Congressman Tom Cole of Oklahoma, a former Republican political consultant, has been a consistent voice for pragmatism over purity inside the party, but he doesn’t foresee any radical shifts after Tuesday’s split decision. “It’s sobering that we’re throwing away Senate seats. But I don’t see a great schism,” Cole says. “I see a very unified, very conservative party that’s very alarmed about the growth of government. Who would be the generals in our great civil war?”
-- Michael Grunwald (http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2012/11/will-the-rights-fever-break-ctd.html)
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-- A "Republican operative," to HuffPo (http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2012/11/quote-for-the-day-1.html)
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Also: No matter how much you hate to hear it, long-term deficit reduction and entitlement reform really are pretty important. Just because conservatives abuse the point doesn't mean there isn't something to it.
-- Kevin Drum (http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2012/11/reality-check-1.html)
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"He was shellshocked," one adviser told CBS News.
Another unnamed senior adviser explained that as returns came in and battleground states went into President Barack Obama's Electoral College column, they felt their paths to potential victory narrowing. CBS reports that the campaign was unprepared for this in part because it had ignored polling that showed the races favoring Obama. Instead, it turned to its own internal "unskewed" polls, which it believed more accurately reflected the situation on the ground. They didn't.
-- Huffington Post (http://ontd-political.livejournal.com/10191790.html)
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