Self must admit that 4 years ago, I thought that whoever won the election would be a 1-term POTUS, because the appalling mess that Dumbya left would have been too much to clean up in just 4 years. Better, of course, that Barack Obama won rather than John McCain, although PBO's missteps and misjudgments about the nastiness of the Republicans over the last 4 years could have led to him losing this year. After last Tuesday, I've never been so happy as to be wrong about a prediction. It's nonetheless still scary that almost 58.5 M 'Amurrikans' were willing to vote for the Republican liar and vessel of destructive delusions that is the ideology of the current Republican party.
Normally, this week's SNLC would have been easy, the standard post-election Loser of the Week poll. Of course, sudden events yesterday threw an unexpected candidate into the poll. You can vote in the poll and move to the next diary. You can also read Ewen MacAskill's post of winners and losers from The Guardian. Or you can keep reading here....
I did vote pretty early in the morning, but I didn't get there super-early like 4 years ago, more like 7:15 AM. I ended up waiting about 20 minutes, and it took me a little over 5 to fill in the circles on the paper ballot, carefully. On the bad side in MO, Proposition E, the not-so-thinly veiled wingnut slam on Obamacare/HCR, won by 62:38 (overall MO stats from the Post-Dispatch here). Peter Kinder unfortunately also won re-election as Lieutenant Governor. Likewise, the President lost MO by double-digits, although he didn't need MO in the end, of course.
The very good news from MO was, of course, the re-election of Claire McCaskill to her Senate seat. I was totally shocked to see that the "legitimate rapist" lost by a double-digit percentage, even among voters from deep red rural MO. The irony is that the McCaskill/Akin % mirrored the Obama/'Rmoney' %, i.e. a lot of split tickets. This strikes me as ridiculous, and reinforced my stereotype of most of this state, even if our side did pretty well in MO. But then another 'expat' friend said, wisely, that sexism is evidently easier to overcome in MO than racism. Given that MO has a pretty decent history of electing women of both parties to higher office, there's much to be said for that.
It was also a hugely risky strategy for MO Democrats to try to pull an "Operation Hilarity" to get Akin as the Repuke opponent, as University of Missouri - St. Louis political science professor Dave Robertson noted in this P-D article by Kevin McDermott:
"It was a risky strategy. She had to count on Akin having a hard time defending himself. Without the (legitimate rape) comment, he would have been able to pull in a lot of money."
Essentially, McCaskill gambled that Akin would say something dumb to use as campaign fodder. In principle, on any sort of gamble like that, you're not guaranteed success. She got her wish, big time, to be sure. But at the time, one couldn't really say that it was a sure thing that Akin would "deliver the goods". You'll also notice that McCaskill ran away, hard, from President Obama, which showed in the mirror-image results. However, you again have to remember the racism factor in MO, so that there were no good choices for Claire regarding how to manage the Obama factor. But even if the President had been "Barry O'Connell", but otherwise had done the exact same things as President Barack Obama, it's not a sure thing that MO would have gone Democratic for the POTUS candidate. We can't do that experiment.
I was actually watching a movie on election night, because at the start of the evening, I didn't think that I'd have the stomach to watch the returns. However, when I emerged from the theater, close to 10 PM, the theater attendant had both a TV and radio on. What wasn't promising initially was the electoral vote count, something like 183:185 O:R. However, what was a surprise was seeing the "legitimate rapist" on TV, and I asked the attendant what was happening. He said that Akin was conceding. You could have heard my jaw hit the floor. So after a quick chat with some other moviegoers in the lobby, I made my way home, and gave in regarding starting to watch the election returns.
So now the hard part awaits, after the partying. With that, time for the usual SNLC protocol, namely your loser stories of the week, but only after you vote in the poll - what, one more poll????? :)