Dear readers, please indulge me. I'm feeling a little low right now, even as I should be walking tall. Six years of near-unitary control of the government by corrupt and out-of-touch Republicans is finally over. My very own Congresswoman, Nancy Pelosi, will soon be elected Speaker of the House. The Imperial Presidency is scuttled, the Permanent Majority is defunct, the Republic is born again. I should be dancing on the corner of Haight and Ashbury and singing "Happy Days Are Here Again", right? Don't get me wrong; I feel incredibly relieved by our victories last night. It's just that, as explained below, I also feel incredibly empty.
Okay, so part of the reason is that since
Rick Santorum lost, my girlfriend and I are going to have to find a new
safeword. But that's trivial and there are plenty of Republicans left behind to choose from. And also,
my candidate in the local race I'd worked so hard to win, didn't. But that also doesn't fully explain it.
My blasé mood really stems from the fact that, as triumphant as I felt about the results on Tuesday night, on Wednesday morning I awoke to the realization that the last six years really happened. That the last six years wasn't just a bad dream or a bad trip to a parallel dimension or a bad alternate history novel. That the GOP didn't maintain control in Washington for as long as they did because Diebold was manipulating election results. That the exit polls for 2002-2004 really were flawed. That the real reason that Democrats were completely out of power for the last six years actually resulted from the fact that the majority of America didn't agree with us, a fact that, living in Republican-free San Francisco, I couldn't begin to comprehend, until now.
After all, I realized this morning, if Bush could steal 2000, 2002, and 2004, why couldn't he steal 2006? And if he could steal 2006, why wouldn't he?
And so I woke up this morning feeling empty because we didn't overthrow a tyrant yesterday. We just landed a few long-deserved electoral body blows in a fight we're still losing. The fact that we landed those punches only shows that we could have done so all along, that the vast conspiracy to suppress our vote didn't exist to the extent my tinfoil-covered head imagined.
I went to bed yesterday jubilant, expecting to wake up to a Democratic version of Morning in America. But for me, it's just Wednesday Morning.
Why? Because twelve years of Wednesday mornings ago, I woke up to find Republicans in control of both houses of Congress, the promise of the Clinton agenda in tatters, and the political landscape for liberals transformed into the equivalent of a public square in Baghdad, circa 2006. And still I found hope, by telling myself that this too shall pass.
So I feel as though we should temper our partisan zeal, our fantasies of revenge, and our jubilation at ending six years of near-dictatorship. For this too shall pass.