Wednesday, November 05, 2008

Election Postmortem
The following are a few thoughts on the election:
  • No one can say this was not an interesting election.
  • The election cycle is too long. It feels like Hillary Clinton started her presidential campaign right after Bush was elected. My guess is that Sarah Palin will start her 2012 presidential bid faster than Clinton did. This is good for talk radio and cable news but bad for the country.
  • The Democratic Congress needs to cool its jets. In my opinion, last night's results did not reflect a huge, national shift left. We are a conservative nation that needed to purge and move beyond the last sixteen years. Yes, I think last night was as much a referendum on divisive government and partisan politics as it was on Obama. Rancor was as much a part of Bill Clinton's presidency as it was George W. Bush's, and Americans are tired of it. From Obama's acceptance speech, it think he understands he needs to govern from the center. And from McCain's concession speech, I felt he too knew it was time, and voter's wanted, to break from politics as usual.
  • Unfortunately, I think Congress may be more divisive as Democratic gains came at the expense of moderate Republicans. Obama will need to bridge this gap.
  • I would not want to be Joe Lieberman.
  • It's the economy, stupid. It's always the economy.
  • Can Sarah Palin please start speaking in complete sentences. And can she stop using "also" repeatedly to connect unrelated fragments.
  • I think Obama will slow his rhetoric on raising taxes. The economy is too weak to withstand any tax increase. He could not do this before the election for political reasons, but I would not be surprised to see the postponement of any tax increase in the near future.

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