That One

The election is well over and I'm finding it a little difficult to unplug. The constant background hum of "conservatives" predicting a Romney landslide was just steadily audible enough to tighten the ole sphincter* on a semi-regular basis. Luckily I could always run to Nate Silver and fivethirtyeight.com to talk me down with its soothing countermelody of comforting, static-free stat-nerd music.

This election always felt to me a lot like a mirror version of 2004. Because I'm burdened with the detail-oriented and deeply sexy double whammy of narcissism and OCD, I keep all my old writings close at hand for reference purposes. And, OK, because if I wait long enough, I'll have forgotten what I've written and when I reread it, I can be entertained anew every so often by the pithy depth and insight of a writer with exactly my sense of humor. Sometimes I literally LOL. I'm not kidding. People have seen me do this. They were right to scorn me.

Republicans, I think, felt a lot about Mitt Romney as I did about John Kerry through the primaries and general election: no thank you, no thank you, no thank you, OK FINE, but only because the other guy is probably Satan.

And somehow, just eight short years later, instead of gayness being used as a wedge to lodge firmly into the struggling, resistant asses of squirmy, not-drunk-enough Democrats, acceptance in the abstract and actual homos in the corporeal were winning elections hand over lubricated and latex-gloved fist.

People are taking a lot of time and energy to turn their schadenfreude gaze at Fox News, but I think the single best line of analysis of the whole night came from that very network, from Bill O'Reilly himself:

"Obama wins because it's not a traditional America anymore," he said. "The white establishment is the minority. People want things."

Now, to be fair, he did say it in a sneering, dismissive moment of extreme condescension driven almost exclusively by panic. But all you need to do is strip away the tone and intent and choose to understand it in exactly the opposite way it was meant (a proud Fox News tradition) and there's some real, measurable meaning there.

It's not "traditional America" anymore. The long process of liberation of the subjugated and disenfranchised is actually, finally, ending. Women have only been allowed to vote for less than a century. Non-whites as a whole have only had the federal government bothering to enforce what had been promised them by the 15th Amendment in terms of electoral participation since 1965. All those things promised in the Declaration of Independence and the follow-on sequel, the Constitution, are fighting through the bedrock layer of cultural overlay to show the first shoots, if not buds of flowers. Colorado and Washington took this somewhat literally, but the idea is the same.

Oh, there are some out there giving the traditional approach an airing, but now people are simply refusing to get out of line. All the votes count. And this is coming right at a population tipping point for non-whites, Latinos especially.

And "people want things." Like political inclusion.

The thing about the takers is: sometimes we don't wait for an offer before we just reach out and snatch.

Caveat: I remember 2010. And 1994. There is no inevitability in American politics and two years is forever. But it's a bit early to worry about all that. In the interim, I'm going to stop reading talkingpointsmemo.com for a bit. And probably sleep a bit better.

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*From what I understand, the body has hundreds of sphincters managing the fluid dynamics of the system. But I bet your mind went straight five-hole, didn't it? You disgust me.