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Tuesday, November 02, 2004

At first I was afraid, I was petrified

At some point right around 5 pm last night, apparently, Karl Rove and his ghoulish minions decided to take down this once-humble-and-now-humbled blog.  We were just getting too powerful and too threatening!!!  Sneakily (for they know no other way), they did it in such a manner as to cause the server itself to suspend the domain.  Flummoxed and frantic, we appealed to a Higher Father, but He said, “are you kidding?  after that stuff you wrote about Me on Sunday?  bugger off-- I’m canvassing for Bush in suburban St. Louis.” Now, if you Google “Berube” (no accents) and “suspended,” you’ll find that former Philadelphia Flyer-Washington Capital-New York Islander-Calgary Flame enforcer Craig Berube was suspended many, many times in his career.  I have been suspended only once.

Anyway, my apologies to everyone for the untimely crash, and my thanks to the dozens of you who wrote to me directly to ask whether I had been sent to Gitmo.  But most of all, thanks to Kurt Nelson, who did a record-breaking site-salvage-and-switch in a matter of hours (while I frantically copied material off old Google caches just in case ten months of work had disappeared into the aether).

And now here’s today’s election news:  at 8 am in central Pennsylvania the voting lines were already around the corner.  I voted for me, by the way.  I really did.  Our Congressional representative, useless rural-Republican pud John Peterson, is running unopposed except by some Libertarian lunatic promoting the famous Randian “remove all the traffic lights and let the superintelligent live to reproduce” platform, so I said, ahhh, the hell with it, and wrote myself in.  Janet wrote me in too, so that’s two votes right there.  It doesn’t sound like much now, but it’s already one infinity percent more votes than I received in 2002, and if you’re reading this blog and voting in Pennsylvania’s fifth Congressional district, won’t you please consider casting your vote my way?  I’m sorry I only got around to campaigning on the afternoon of Election Day.  I was really busy in October.

I’ve posted my Election Day Exhortation over at The American Street, but now that I’m back in my own digs again I’ll reproduce it here too.  And after meeting so many of my neighbors in the voting line at 8 am this morning, I’m thinking that certain polls in certain urban areas are going to be backed up for hours and hours, right up to closing time.  So count every vote and make every vote count!

OK, here’s the official exhortation.

Aside from LBJ and FDR, no Democratic nominee for President has taken office with more than 51 percent of the popular vote since . . . when?

No, wrong.

Not even close!

C’mon, think back, think back, think hickory . . . yes, that’s right, it’s Andrew Jackson!

Unreal, no? But true. Clinton never cracked 51; neither did Carter, Kennedy, Truman, Wilson, or Cleveland, or of course Tilden, who didn’t take office for some reason. Pierce and Van Buren came close. To reprise:

Clinton 1996: 49.2
Clinton 1992: 42.9
Carter 1976: 50.1
Kennedy 1960: 49.7
Truman 1948: 49.7
Wilson 1916: 49.4
Wilson 1912: 41.9
Cleveland 1892: 46.1
Cleveland 1888: 48.8 (lost electoral vote)
Cleveland 1884: 48.5
Tilden 1876: 51.0 (lost electoral vote thanks to Katherine Harris)
Buchanan 1856: 45.3
Pierce 1852: 50.9
Polk 1844: 49.6
Van Buren 1836: 50.9
Jackson 1832: 55.0

The point should be clear: Kerry needs your vote, wherever you are. There are no safe states. Everything hinges on getting out every last damn vote in every last damn precinct in the land. We will take the Electoral College, folks, but we also need to do what no Democrat save for LBJ and FDR has done since the Democrats were the party of slavery.

Let’s get Kerry 51.5 or more.

Popular vote majority: it’s up to you!! 

Posted by Kurt on 11/02 at 05:49 AM
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