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As it becomes evident that Barack Obama is going to win, a lot of liberals are anticipating Nov. 4 as their Day of Revenge -- for the Supreme Court’s selection of Bush, the war in Iraq, the Swift-Boating of John Kerry, the Willie Horton ad, Watergate, the Taft-Hartley Act, Teapot Dome. Cowed and defeated for decades, Democrats are ready to use their Charles Atlas majorities to kick sand in the faces of GOP bullies.
“I want them to hurt as much as we did,” wrote political blogger Markos Moulitsas Zuniga. “I want their spirits crushed, their backs broken.”
“I don’t want to the Republican Party simply defeated in November,” wrote critic James Wolcott. “I want to see it smashed beyond all recognition.”
“The greatest joy a man can know is to conquer his enemies and drive them before him,” said Mongol warlord Genghis Khan. “To ride their horses and take away their possessions. To see the faces of those who were dear to them bedewed with tears, and to clasp their wives and daughters in his arms”
You get the point. Eleven o’clock on the first Tuesday in November is going to be the greatest sexless moment most liberals have ever experienced. America won’t just be electing a Democratic president, it will be electing an Northern, liberal, big-city bi-racial law professor who has written two best-selling books. If you were playing SimWhiteHouse, that would be your avatar. Not even Aaron Sorkin dared to concoct such a Democratic fantasy.
The Republicans are going to spend the next eight years grinding their jaws to the dentin, just like we did for the last eight. Won’t that be beautiful to see?
No, it will not. For me, the worst aspect of the Bush Years has been the way they made the political personal. Before 2000, I never thought of “Democrat” as part of my identity. It was just a way I (mostly) voted. I thought only kooks like the Spartacist League and the Michigan Militia took politics so seriously that they only socialized with fellow travelers. But that year, I joined my ward organization to volunteer for Al Gore. I was so devastated by the result that I would lie in bed some mornings, brooding like the kicker who missed the Super Bowl winning field goal, wondering how the guy who’d won had been locked out of the White House. I started snubbing Republicans: a dude in my running club, my brother-in-law, and my boyhood friend Dan, who smugly insisted that Bush was the only legitimate winner.
In fact, I haven’t seen Dan since 2002. I last heard from him when he sent me a Christmas card, with a picture of his newborn daughter, Reagan. (Yeah, that’s the spelling.) I threw it in the trash, thinking “He’s gone ‘round the twist.”
When I watched sports, I started rooting for the teams from blue states. Maryland vs. Florida? Go Terps! I bought a “Blue States of America” t-shirt. I wrote a whole book suggesting the Blue States had more in common with Canada than with those Red States. Even my dad said Hurricane Katrina could have been worse: “at least it hit a Red State.”
I don’t remember thinking like this in the ‘80s and ‘90s. I dated a couple Republican girls, and politics was never an issue. It would be an issue now. That’s why we have sites like democraticsingles.net and singleconservativedating.com.
DU has plenty of outspoken, politically-engaged readers, and I’m sure a lot of you have stories about friendships or family relationships that have been strained, or even broken, by the partisanship of the past eight years. Those stories would be worth telling here. Is this something we’ll have to live with permanently, or is it a result of the close, controversial nature of the last two elections? Will Republicans be just as embittered about Obama as Democrats were about Bush?
My biggest hope for Obama -- and for McCain, too -- has been that he’ll get us talking to each other again. I think the magnitude of his victory may be as important as anything he does in office. If he wins big, anyone who complains will look like a sore loser. There will always be Freepers and Dittoheads harping Obama’s “Muslim connections,” but maybe the rest of us can have a break from partisanship.
On Wednesday, I would urge people to say -- nothing. Don’t rub it in to your mom who voted for Bush in 2004. Don’t say “How does it feel?” to the neighbor with the McCain sign. That’s where a less partisan era will begin. Not with the parties, but with the people.
I’m not going to call my friend Dan up and say, “Hey, a Democrat won! I can talk to you now!” But I’ll send him a Christmas card. He’ll understand. And, I’m going to throw away my Blue States of America shirt. We can’t go on like this forever.
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