Tip of the Iceberg

1 - As Barack Obama said in his e-mail thanking volunteers "We have a lot of work to do to get our country back on track, and I'll be in touch soon about what comes next."

I hope that part of the way Barack Obama will succeed as President is by continuing to call on us all to do more and act more as a community. I look forward to doing my part.

2 - @Mike - Indeed. I'm sorry this outcome doesn't inspire hope for you, but I wish you peace as you come to terms with it.

@Ben - As do I... in particular, if he goes through with his plan to hire a "national CTO", I'm intrigued to find out how people in our niche can contribute to the overall good in ways that haven't previously been harnessed.

3 - Yeah, I'll get used to the overall shock factor and eventually accept it. I can compare it this hypothetical way: It was like my football team playing in the superbowl. The game is tied late in the 4th with just seconds to go. As they're driving down the field getting closer to field goal range to put in the game winner, my team's QB throws a short pass that is intercepted by a defender and ran back for the game winning touchdown for the other team.

4 - Thanks, man, definitely appreciate that and Wil is right. I just couldn't stand the "in your face" crap my wife and I got this past week. She called me at work Wednesday morning, crying, because of a text message she got from a democratic friend basically degrading her for not supporting Obama. They are no longer friends. For me, on a couple occasions (mostly on facebook and myspace) the second someone found out I didn't support Obama, it was like "HA HA, WE won, YOU lost, YOU suck, go live under a bridge for the next 4 years while WE experience change" and that just made things even worse (of course that wasn't literally, but it was damn near close). One person said to my face no less (and it was a coworker unfortunately) "you were completely wrong to even fathom voting for anyone else."

That's also why I don't look forward to the 4 year thing and presidential races. Things get heated way too quickly and people climb up on their high horse never to come back down.

But, anyway, it's done, over with, past history, and we don't have to deal with it again until 2012.

Damn, I'll have a 4 year old by then.

5 - @Mike - Absolutely. Earlier tonight I read a post by Wil Wheaton that I definitely needed to see. I thought you might find it interesting as well:

{ Link }

I think it brilliantly sums up both the reasons for the temptation we Obama supporters feel to be smug and, perhaps, even combative about his victory... and the reasons we must not. So, to that end, I apologize if my rhetoric has at all wandered into that territory. I suspect that it has. I sincerely do hope that you are a recipient of any benefits that may result from Obama's presidency, partly out of principle, but partly because, as you mentioned, you are one of my closest friends, so I too don't want ideological differences to distract from that.

6 - Alright, alright, that was a bad comparison. It was actually the shock factor and not a direct comparison to what happened that I was going for there. Let's see...a better comparison....My football team backs their way into the playoffs, and gets lucky and ends up in the Superbowl only to be manhandled by the opposition in a huge and embarrassing defeat. To top it all off, fans of the winning team continue to stomp on, mutilate and beat up fans of the losing team in a "kick 'em while they're down" type of fashion.

That's how I felt this past week.

Can we please just put this to rest? Rockey's done tearing me down and I don't want to take any more from two of my closest friends. Let's just agree to disagree. I want to end this now for the sake of our friendship. I value that much more than a presidential race.

What's done is done, we're stuck with him for at least 4 years and there was absolutely nothing Christine or I could have done to stop it.

Life goes on.

7 - Well, congratulations on your win.

Good post on my myspace. You know as well as I know that I am optimistic about most things. Probably too optimistic sometimes. I just cannot be about this.

8 - @Mike - Not quite seeing a parallel... most non-partisan polling was showing a fairly steady lead for Obama most of the campaign, especially the last month. If anything, the results slightly underperformed most projections. Besides, you didn't vote for McCain either, so how was your team "tied"? Offhand, I'd guess you voted for either Ralph Nader or Bob Barr, who, together with the rest of the 3rd party candidates garnered about 2% of the total vote, which was actually a bit more than much of the polling had predicted. The big surprise last night wasn't that Obama won, rather that he didn't carry more of the so-called battleground states.

I also still haven't seen you delineate what makes him a "bonehead". He graduated top of his class at Harvard, which takes a fair bit of smarts. He's written (not ghost-written) two books; I have difficulty imagining our current president reading a book, much less writing two. I'm reluctant to pursue this much further without some explanation of what specifically about his policies could be risky, foolish, etc. - and how precedent would support those conclusions. For example, he's proposed returning to a Clintonesque tax code; average middle class incomes rose by $7,500 and jobs were created during the Clinton terms, whereas during the era of the Bush tax cuts that were supposed to stimulate the economy, there was a net loss of jobs and the average middle class salary dropped by $2,000. One might argue that there were other factors that caused the 90's economy to perform better than it has this decade... which implies that Obama's plan to raise taxes 3% on the richest 1% and give $1000 of that money to you each year (I'm assuming we're in approximately the same tax bracket) does not, on its own, guarantee economic retrogression.

In other words, I understand that many people are disappointed by the results; I would have been had Obama lost. But I'd love to have a reasoned debate about where we go from here... gut reactions and emotions don't make a politician a "bonehead", except as an undeserved recipient of a label. Supported by history, do you have any specific reason for the mistrust you describe, or "just a hunch"? And if the latter is the case, how reliable would you say your hunches have been in this arena over time?