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Well, as we can all see, this time around we've had: 1) A decisive popular vote victory. That's 3.5 million. Plus some of the states had a smaller Kerry victory than with Gore last time (eg California or New Jersey - yes contrary to popular belief the Bay Area precincts picked up about 500k votes for Bush alone) 2) A pretty good electoral vote victory - 286. Yes, the only reason why IA and NM didn't call for Bush is because the democrat governors and sec of states were doing Kerry a favour by keeping their tallies (I mean, has anyone heard of the excuse "I'm too tired to count"? That's what happenned in IA last night). 3) They gained 3 seats in the Senate. This includes Minority Leader Tom Daschle getting ousted which is as sad as Newt Gingrich getting ousted when he was speaker of the house. 4) They gained 3 seats in the house 5) 11 states overwhelmingly supported the ban on gay marriage. Not that I care, I support gay marriage (let me step aside for the lightning strike for a second :-) ) but this was a big conservative push too. 6) The Hollywood factor: Whoopi, Michael Moore, Bruce Springsteen, etc. They used their strenght on screen and gave him a hard time with all the rhetoric. He got selected, votes were stolen in 2000, "keep bush where it belongs", Bush supported bin Laden etc etc... I don't know how everyone feels but I feel that this is a clean sweep for the conservatives (almost reminds me of the BJP sweep of the 90s). Whether you are rich, poor, black, white, 1 vote is 1 vote and carries no weighted average. I think it's time to move and tone down the whining about vote stealing, disenfranchisement, etc etc. Like Santosh said, mature criticism of his policies are fine. That's what energizes the country. On the democrat side, I have to commend: 1) The "get out the vote" drive. They have to be credited with getting out record numbers of voters. This includes the ultra left wing moveon.org and other "527s". This was awesome. Maybe everyone that registered didn't vote but there was an increase of 20 millions voters (or 20%) from last time. 2) Kerry has to be commended for not drawing out this election into the courts. He could have done that and waited it out. Personally I would have waited till all the votes were counted in Ohio but he decided to draw the line. Any flames, feel free to throw a rock, burn my house down, etc... Auri
