This is Our Country

It's over. Tuesday is over.

by Brian Howard

It's over. The excruciating grind. The exhausting, agonizing, fretful wait.

It's over. Tuesday is over.

Nov. 4 was intolerably long. And each subdivision was incrementally worse.

Midnight to 8 was like having insomnia on Christmas Eve. There was no line when I went to vote, and I looked for a larger meaning in that. All day I clicked on news and poli-sci nerd statistician sites, waiting for something really bad or really good to go down. I went down to Plough & the Stars for CP's Where Were You? party, which was fun but also absolute torture until the meaningful numbers started popping up on the big screen.

After wearing out my track pad all week on fivethirtyeight and 270towin, I knew what we were looking for. We needed Virginia. Pennsylvania. Ohio. Florida. And all of them — Virginia most tantalizingly so — were taking their sweet, sweet time. So we drank.

And then the dam began to burst. Pennsylvania, the Kerry state McCain was desperate to flip, went blue in a big way — by about the same margin early October polls suggested. Then Fox (Fox!) called Ohio for Obama. Checkmate.

Everything else was electoral college gravy. And oh, was there gravy. In addition to the Kerry states, Obama flipped Virginia (finally), Ohio, Indiana (!), Iowa, Florida, Nevada, New Mexico and Colorado. The map had been fundamentally redrawn.

A popular question around the bar was, naturally, which was better: World Series or Obama victory? In Philly, the answer is "both." Yes, the World Series is a much more focused, selfish kind of high. As the tagline on our sports blog, The Sports Complex, now reads, "Our long municipal nightmare is over." The tagline for Barack Obama's victory: Our long, national nightmare is over.

We've wrested control of the White House from a cadre of fear-mongering ideologues whose virulent strain of conservatism has us waging two suffocatingly expensive wars and hemorrhaging our personal liberties. For all the hot air about reaching across the aisle, we've actually, at long last, elected a president who doesn't believe in aisles. We're all better for it.

There were lots of winners over the course of the evening: Obama, Biden and the American public came out on top. So did much of the advance polling, which, the map bears out, was amazingly accurate. And you gotta give props to fivethirtyeight's Nate Silver, whose model has been nearly perfect (though wins in any of the not-yet-decided states will show Silver's landslide prediction of 348.6 electoral votes to have been conservative).

The losers: Folksy fear-mongering. "Socialist" as pejorative. And, of course, the Bradley Effect. As Silver put it, just after midnight: "Voters who decided late broke about evenly between the two candidates. No evidence of a Bradley Effect — none whatsoever."

Which is what many of us were most worried about: an X-factor, some dark quirk of the American psyche that would render mountains of polling data horribly, laughably wrong.

Congratulations, America. You're not secretly more racist than you admit to be.

As I write this, Philadelphians are dancing in the street. Which is exactly what we were doing seven days prior. It's been, as some have already noted, something like Philly's best week ever.

Leaving on Top

It's with a heavy heart that we bid adieu to staff writer Tom Namako. I could play it like we set up this last week and its bookend victories for him. Or that Tom was hired here to fulfill two missions, and with those missions accomplished, he is jumping, like Scott Bakula in Quantum Leap, into his next challenge. But the truth is Tom landed a job at the New York Post and would have been foolish to turn it down. A dogged, ethical reporter — a journalist's journalist — Namako will be missed. His final byline is here.

(bhoward@citypaper.net)