The Results Are In, and It's Four More Years

I want to say that this election is a repudiation of greed, that the politics of "Fuck you, I've got mine," are a failure. I want this election to show once and for all that white people can't just care about and take care of each other, that the country has become too diverse for that, and that anyway, that was never good policy. This, after all, has been my problem with my party--we've gotten to a point where the successful are more concerned about protecting what they have than they are about any other single facet of the national political landscape, and it's driving people away. It's driving ME away.

But I'm not sure that this is the lesson that we've learned.

I mean, I'm pretty sure that the national Republican Party apparatus can read, and that it will figure out that it lost because, bottom line, the Republicans had older, whiter, more successful voters--except those in NYC and Boston and California, and the ones who're gay--but they didn't have ANYONE else. And that's not enough anymore. The country is changing demographically.

But. Will the realization lead to change and to a willingness to compromise and to govern, or will it lead to a perfunctory attempt to simply bolt affluent Latinos onto the sidecar of The Republican Agenda?

Truth is, we've got four more years now, and if we don't compromise, we're screwed. The analysis I heard this morning said that Obama would be happy to let the country go over the Fiscal Cliff because that, at least, would allow him to raise taxes and cut Defense. And he could negotiate from there. So the play now is bipartisan, like it or not. Because, truth is, it's either a controlled decent into austerity, or it's free fall, and NO ONE should want free fall.

Either way, it ought to be interesting.