While the Kerry claim that he could somehow close his margin of defeat in Ohio by means of provisional ballots is ludicrous, it seems to me that Kerry still has one chance to remain alive for a while, though it vanishingly small, and would still lead ultimately to his defeat. I bring this up more as a thought exercise than in discussing something that might realistically occur.

http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004/pages/results/scorecard/

CNN currently gives Bush 254 electoral votes (including Nevada with 5) and Kerry 252 electoral votes (including Wisconsin with 10). The only remaining undecided states, according to CNN, are Ohio, Iowa, and New Mexico. As I said, there’s no way that Bush can lose Ohio, so Ohio’s 20 votes would bring him up to 274 electoral votes and victory. However, Bush’s margin in Nevada is only 20,000 votes. While it seems extremely improbable, if Kerry were able successfully to challenge the result in Nevada and come up with absentee or provisional votes to reverse the result there, that would reduce Bush’s EV to 269 and raise Kerry’s to 257. If Kerry also managed to win the still undecided states of Iowa (7) and New Mexico (5), the race would tie at 269 and go into the House of Representatives.

Of course, the Republicans control the majority of the state delegations in the House, so ultimately Bush would still win. But, since Kerry, in the gallant, noble, generous, fair-minded, public-spirited attitude that characterizes today’s Democratic Party, seems intent on stretching out this process as long as he can, the Nevada option would seem marginally less ludicrous than the Ohio option. Today’s Democratic party is just the hissing of snakes in hell (see Paradise Lost, Book X, beginning at line 504).

The election has turned out similar to the last one with Bush a few points stronger. Thus, GWB wins the popular vote by about 3 and a half million after losing it in 2000. Bush wins the electoral college by only a little more than 2000. He ran stronger in the Red states this time which built his popular vote lead. The cultural divide is the difference in the election vote.

Did anyone hear any mention of Proposition 200 in Arizona during the babbling by the talking heads on TV? It passed by 56-44%, despite frenzied opposition by the usual suspects. Peter Brimelow comments in this thread:
http://www.vdare.com/pb/2004_election.htm

The lack of news about Prop 200 on the tv last night was of a piece with all of the fact-free coverage—not just in this election, but for the last several elections. The news organizations no longer exist for the purpose of informing the public about interesting facts. They exist for the purpose of promoting themselves and their preferred politics. When their preferred politics are not succeeding, like last night, they retreat more and more into contentless blather. I assure you that if Kerry had been winning last night, there would have been less blather and a lot more reporting.

This first really hit me in the 1996 elections, when I noticed that through the entire evening, the tv people said nothing about Gingrich’s tough re-election fight in his Georgia district. In former days, each interesting Senate and House race would get due attention on election night—and especially if the Speaker of the House was fighting for his political survival. That’s dramatic stuff, right? The sort of thing that reporters would normally make a big deal of. Well, Gingrich pulled out a narrow victory, but you barely heard anything about it on the tv.

What bothers me more than the so-called media “bias” is the ugly smallness of it, the sheer lack of a normal instinct of fairness and generosity.

My younger brother lives in Arizona and told me a very interesting detail about Prop 200. For the first time, it allows average citizens to file criminal and civil complaints against state officials who refuse to enforce laws. This is driven in part due to the fact that the kleptocracy in the AZ capital has steadfastly refused to enforce English-only laws, which were passed overwhelmingly and even upheld by the 9th Circus court. This would apply to those who refuse to enforce immigration laws as well.

Needless to say, the vast majority of office-holders were working furiously to defeat this. The lawsuits blocking its implementation have no doubt alredy been filed.

Kerry’s cheap move was simply his way of poking a finger into Bush’s eye one more time. Real classy.

Since I called today’s Democrats, and by implication their standard bearer Kerry, Miltonian devils turned into hissing snakes in hell, I’ve got to be fair and say that Kerry’s decision to concede the election was extremely welcome, and his concession speech gracious and human. Losing—and accepting his loss—brought out the best in him (as it even did to the demonic Al Goreleone when he finally conceded in December 2000), a decent humility and even unfaked affection for his fellow humans, for his staff, for the Americans he met while he was campaigning across the country. There was even one truly fine line in the speech (paraphrase): “In American elections, there are no losers, because when you wake up the morning after, you’re still an American.” That is a noble sentiment, worthy of being included in a book of quotations.

I believe that the experience of campaigning for president did make Kerry “grow” a bit, in that, in his whole adult life he had been in the arrogant, self-regarding Massachusetts liberal mode, a mode that was never challenged, and so he never had to change, but as a presidential candidate, he began to realize that that didn’t work, and his previously insufferably arrogant and contemptuous personality was modified and became a bit softer and more endurable as the campaign went on. Perhaps if the campaign had lasted another eight months, he might have even learned to stop spastically sticking out his hands at the oddest moments while he was speaking, and learned to stop darting out his tongue, reptile-like, in between sentences, and other weird things that you’d think his legions of advisors and speech coaches might have cured him of.

Let’s also be clear that his gracious concession speech does not make up one iota for the thundering demagogic lies he told as a candidate. One example: going after the Patriot Act (a bill he had voted for) as though it were the most sinister, threatening thing in the history of the country, and then after months of this withering attack, turning around and admitting that 95 percent of the Patriot Act was fine, it was just one little tiny part of it that needed fixing. Yeah, but what about all those months in which he spoke of John Ashcroft as some Nazi-like figure who had taken over the government? This sort of thing is just unforgivable.

But one last thought. The funny this about Kerry, just like Gore, is that if he had been pumped up in himself, and less contemptuous toward his rival, he could have easily won the presidency. But so many politicians only become half-human after they’ve been defeated and crazed ambition is no longer surging through their arteries.