Election 2008 - Post Mortem

The voters have spoken and we have a new direction. I'll run down the good, the bad and the ugly in this post. Where we go from here will be a separate post.

Winners:

Sen. Barack Obama is now the president-elect. Whether you attribute his election to massive vote fraud, or an immense advantage in campaign funds (fueled by donations of questionable legality) or anything else there is no question of who won or lost.

The mainstream media who demonstrated they could successfully throw an election.

Senate Democrats clearly won as they picked up 5 seats. While they did not reach the magic number of 60 seats, they got close enough that the threat of a filibuster is not really an option.

ACORN clearly won. If it's revealed that you're running a criminal enterprise to influence an election you definitely feel a lot better to find out any investigation will be controlled by people appointed by the guy you were cheating to help.

Fans of out of control government spending and earmarks won as well.

Fans of government corruption won. U.S. Rep. William Jefferson cruises past Moreno.

People who understand that marriage is a union of one man and one woman won again.

Losers

Sen. John McCain - Waited until his concession speech to give his best performance of the campaign. This election will be poked, prodded and examined to death. However, to me McCain made several strategic missteps. The biggest mistake was to attempt to play his opponents game by repudiating the sitting president from his own party and go change, change, change. He needed to defend the overall course we are on otherwise people would pick his opponent who was the clearer choice for change. The other big mistake was to restrict his campaign from aggressively making the case against his opponents character.

The little remaining credibility of the mainstream media was completely destroyed. Throughout the campaign they displayed no objectivity about this race and chose not to pursue any skeletons of the Dem candidate.

Sen. Dole and Sen. Sununu. It is usually very difficult to unseat an incumbent senator. It takes either a major screw up or a tidal wave against their party. Dole was affected by both as she ran a sloppy campaign with ads that backfired against her. Sununu lost a rematch against a popular former governor in a year which clearly was bad for republicans.

The future of the Supreme Court took a major hit as the most pro-abortion presidential candidate ever was elected. Obama has made clear that he will appoint judges who will base rulings on their emotions instead of actually applying the law as it is written.

The reputations of the people of Pennsylvania and Minnesota. Within the last few weeks Rep. Jack Murtha (D-PA) twice insulted his constituents as racists and rednecks and yet those same people had so little personal pride they still voted for his reelection. No winner has been declared in the U.S. Senate race in Minnesota, but that state's reputation took a serious hit by the mere fact that Al Franken got a single vote let alone over a million votes.

Tax payers obviously will be the biggest losers from last night. Anyone who believed Obama's lies about 95% of people getting a tax cut should be committed.