For what it is worth, I predict that Barack Hussein Obama will become the 44th President of the United States of America shortly before midnight (Central Time) with an Electoral College vote of 375-163.
Here’s my map:
{{ $image := .ResourceGetMatch “375-163.jpg” }}
Make your own at: 270towin.com.
From Henry V, this speech seems fitting today.
Henry V:-
My lifetime has seen nine presidents: Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush Sr., Clinton, and Bush Jr. There have been twelve Presidential elections since I was born, and seven since I was old enough to vote. The candidates I’ve supported have been on the losing side more than the winning; my record is 2 and 5. This year’s election marks the eighth time I will have voted for a President, and the first time in a long time I’ve felt like I was going to be pleased with the results on the day after.
Living in Kansas means my vote for Senator Barack Obama won’t matter, at least not in the Electoral College, as Kansas is unfortunately firmly in the “red” category. However, I am proud to be able to vote, and proud to cast my vote for someone who represents so much change, so much promise, so much hope. Not just hope for America, but hope for the world.
Sibylle and I have friends, and family, in Europe and South America. They all want to see an Obama Presidency over a McCain one. I hope that America delivers him to the world Wednesday morning as President-Elect Barack Obama.
My parents had President Kennedy and the feeling of Camelot in the early Sixties. My generation now has Barack Obama. I fervently hope that his administration extends the full potential of the next eight years. The next President will face some huge issues, and no matter how successful he is, many Americans and many abroad, will be hurt by the turmoil that comes with change. The financial crisis is global and will not be solved overnight or without some cost to all of us on Earth. My hope for the next four years is that we give the new administration a chance to make change, a chance to succeed. My fear is that the hurry-up, quick-fix, short-attention span lifestyle so many in America have embraced will expect nirvana within days of Senator Obama’s election, and few will have the patience to nurture change and cultivate its promise.
Regardless of your stance on this election, if you haven’t already, go vote.
I’ve always been a rather indifferent voter, and, having moved several times in the last decade, I’ve sometimes been unregistered and unable to vote. This year is different, however. This year I have been very active in following the campaigns and watching the polls.
My favorite polling site, FiveThirtyEight (so named as that is the total number of votes in the Electoral College), takes a very different approach to reporting polling data. Its founder is hugely successful at predicting baseball, and he brings the same rigor to examining polling data. Basically he looks at how successful a given pollster was in the past and weighs their current polls accordingly. Ever since mid-September FiveThirtyEight has predicted an Obama win, both in popular votes and in the Electoral College. Every other indicator that I’ve seen supports this.
So why am I nervous? Why do I have a sense of impending doom?
As an indifferent voter I have voted Republican, Democrat, and Independent. I’m one of those people who truly does vote for the person and their stated platform and not for the larger party behind them. I suspect that I am (or was) one of those people who are labeled “undecided” by the press, one of the people who will ultimately vote but are invisible to the predictive polling process because we may or may not have voted in the last election.
Personally I feel that the Presidency is a high-wire juggling act. Even with a partisan Congress, even with a mandate from the people in the form of a “landslide” popular vote, even with the support and partnership with allies around the world, the President can do little more than nudge the country in the direction s/he feels best. All president’s since Franklin Roosevelt have been judged by their first 100 days, an unfair measure as 1932 was an extraordinary time in America’s history with perhaps the most extraordinary President we’ve ever had.
2009 and beyond will be an extraordinary time in America. We are in desperate need of extraordinary leadership. We may yet be the world’s only superpower militarily, but I fear our supremacy financial, and morally is lost. Without careful, thoughtful guidance, without measured and responsible leadership, without a redress of our failings at home and abroad, we risk further erosion of America.
The final weeks of this election have shown the true character, and the true failings, of our candidates. One has focused on the issues of the day, primarily the financial crisis, while the other has resorted to guilt by association and mud-slinging of the worst sort. I view the election process as the dates and courtship leading up to a marriage. Everyone is always on their best behavior on a first date, and that continues throughout the courtship. Once the marriage is consummated it is unlikely that behaviors will improve.
So if a candidate only talks about fighting and war, if they only try to smear the other candidate with past associations, if they cannot correctly state the Constitutional responsibilities they would possess should their side win, then we are fools to reward their behavior, and worse, we are fools to expect anything more than this “courtship” behavior.
American’s, it seems, are conditioned to respond to situation-comedy one-lines and comebacks. We don’t evaluate candidates based on their education or prior accomplishments, instead we are swayed by punchy sound bites and trite phrases. I am nervous about the outcome on Tuesday night because at some point in the last week or so I’ve become apathetic about the election. Two years of hype, two years of increasingly shrill prognostications, two years of campaigning has gotten old. I want it to be over already. I am as involved as I have ever been in the Presidential election process and I don’t care anymore. How many other voters feel the same way? How many others just want this whole mess to go away? Maybe I am apathetic and not representative of the rest of America. Certainly turnout for early voting has been huge; maybe apathy in American politics is waning.
I want America to be about hope again. I want America to be a power for good in the world again. I want the next generation to have the same opportunities and options my generation had. I shudder to think that there are legions of people who respond to and want the kind of angry, spiteful, situation-comedy put-down level of intellect leading America. I don’t want to win at the expense of the other side, neither do I want to lose to the gloats and smirks of the other side. We’ve taken the election of the President, which should be about selecting a platform of ideals and moral positions, and reduced it to living with the winner of “Survivor: The White House.”
I will continue to read the polls until Tuesday. Shortly after 6:00 am that day I will cast my vote. And I’ll spend most of the day obsessively refreshing various browser tabs, tracking the pundits and nay-sayers, trying to glean some shred of hope about what Wednesday’s dawn will bring.
My little site has had 25,001 page views since December 2005, from 14,137 unique visits. A tiny amount compared to the tens of thousands of visits some sites register daily, but significant to me. Thank you to everyone who visits regularly, and welcome to any one new.
{{ $image := .ResourceGetMatch “25001.jpg” }}
People in the Middle for Obama is an excellent set of “switcher” style ads featuring people who are thoughtful about their choosing Barack Obama in this election. All of the vignettes are worth watching, but my favorite is below. I like the phrase “energy without anger” that is used. This simple phrase sums up, for me, a fundamental difference between John McCain and Barack Obama. Senator Obama has great energy without anger while Senator McCain seems to have energy because his is angry. America and the world have seen enough of the only “superpower” being angry. It is time for our eight year temper tantrum to end.
{{ $image := .ResourceGetMatch “bTxJmxPTEyMjUMTE4MDQyNjAmcHQ9MTIyNTQxMTgzOTQNyZwPTM5NzE3MSZkPSZnPTEmdDmbzwYWY1ZTVkNTVjNTU*ZjAyODZkMGVkNGFmYmRkMGM4Zg==.gif” }}
If you are at all unsure about where to vote, Google Maps can help. Go to http://maps.google.com/vote and enter your street address and zip code to receive a map showing your home and your voting location, and localized information for your state and community.
This is an excellent community service by Google.
My new position at work comes with a smart phone. In this case a Motorola “Moto Q 9c” from Verizon. I’ve never had a smart phone before so what follows are my first impressions, after just three days use.
The “automatic” profile which switches the phone to silent when the calendar shows I am in a meeting, and reverts to the normal profile when I am not, is very nice.
The screen is sufficiently bright and the font, while tiny, is legible even to my trifocal assisted eyes. The glass over the screen does smudge easily, but that hasn’t been a major problem yet.
The EReader book software refuses to install on my workstation, making it impossible to add to the phone. I’m not sure what the difficulty is at this point. Being able to read e-books on this device would improve it’s worth to me immensely.
The size and heft are pleasing. While the screen is nowhere near as large as the iPhone, it is sufficient for a extension of Outlook. And since work is footing the bill for this device I can’t really complain. The phone is light enough to carry comfortably in a shirt pocket, something I can’t do with my Sony Ericsson.
Overall it is a nice device, one that will prove useful as many of my days are filled with meetings now. Having had just a tiny sip of the smart phone kool aid, I am even more determined to someday have an iPhone.
Updated: Turns out the EReader software expects the Microsoft ActiveSync software, which allows for synchronization between the handset and your computer, to already be installed. Once ActiveSync was in place, the EReader software installed perfectly. Now my library of eBooks is available on the Q phone. Excellent.
Vote.