Saturday, November 06, 2004

Simple arithmetic and mandates, another contest, and the 2008 ticket

You hear it all the time: Bush enters his second term with the largest popular vote ever recorded in presidential elections. Mandate! – says our man of great humility. Mandate! – repeat the pundits (in horror or in joy, depending on their leanings). Okay, but we know who has the second largest number of votes ever:

GWB (04): 59,459,765
Kerry (04): 55, 949,407

Followed by:

Reagan (84): 54,455,075
Gore (00): 50,999,897
GWB (00): 50,456,002
the other Bush (88): 48,882,808
Clinton (96): 47,402,357
Nixon (72): 46,740,323
Clinton (92): 44,908,254
Reagan (80) 43,901,812

Note that in addition to the 55,949,407 Kerry supporters, more than 75,000,000 did not feel compelled to demonstrate their support for a GWB Mandate (meaning, more than 40% of eligible voters did not vote). Thus the *Mandate* effectively comes from about 30% of Americans.

The other interesting statistic is that, aside from the 2000 election (which Bush *won* by just 5 votes in the Electoral College), it was the smallest margin of victory won in the Electoral College since 1916, when Woodrow Wilson beat Charles Evans Hughes by 23 votes, 277 to 254.

Mandate indeed! With this in mind, I’ll post another contest, call it the “Hubris Contest” (it originated in my neighborhood, but people are feeling stumped). Here it is: Come up with a word that would describe the way over-the-top, overarching pride Dubya now has.

Commentators say Edwards is in an excellent position to jump into the race again in 08. And who on the Republican ticket? On the other side of the ocean, where people are trying to understand how we pick our leaders, Jeb and Jenna have both been mentioned.

The otherworldliness of sleep deprivation

Where am I? What time is it? Well might I ask. I know one thing – I’m into the fourth day after the election and I have yet to sleep more than two hours each of the nights. I’ve jotted some notes from when Friday turned into Saturday and I didn’t even notice:

Friday: one hour late for a dinner party (they were on dessert already when I arrived! Hey, these were ravenously starving individuals if you think about it, but still, how rude is that on my part – ONE HOUR LATE!); an hour and a half late for the Torts section party (I’ve lost all awareness of time passing); one broken glass at said party (thank you for pretending it was just some cheap piece of junk you picked up at Sears; I know darn well the Sears does not sell delicate, long-stemmed, tinted-blue wine glasses, but it was nice of you to try to make me feel better); a late start at L’Etoile this morning (when I dragged myself in at 7, the Market was robust, the Café was already opened and Chef O had called twice leaving messages for me); and a late finish at L’Etoile. [More than six hours of picking and lugging vegetables in slo-mo; SIX HOURS! How did I survive? With the help of this:]


I needed that. Posted by Hello
It may surprise some to learn that today, on the last Outdoor- Market day, I ate my first L’Etoile croissant for the year (I had their pumpkin & chocolate one and it was fantastic!). If you work in a restaurant, you don’t really eat the food that is being prepared there. If you are cooking, you have to taste to adjust for flavors, but that’s all. Just about everyone I know practices this type of abstention. Oh sure, they, like me, will go to dine there now and then, but on days that they are working, there is a real separation of powers between labor and consumption.

While sipping my café au lait and munching on the croissant, I picked up a copy of yesterday’s paper. I found the front-page photo of the first post-election Cabinet Meeting quite entertaining in a sardonic sort of way. Take a look:



The gray suit and the white shirt are back in style.  Posted by Hello
Missing is the look of people hard at work. There is not a single rolled-up sleeve at the table, figuratively-speaking or otherwise. And note the guy in the circle because he is on his way out! I have heard rumors from very well-informed sources that if he goes, half the staff at the State Department is going to quit. That, of course, would be awkward or awesome, depending on your perspective. But Donald Rumsfeld seems to feel that we want him to continue to pound his fists at everyone and their shadow overseas. So two more years of him. Two years? Want kind of a commitment is that anyway? He’s already announcing that two more years of this Administration is about as much as he can take? How about the rest of us? We're stuck with four!And aren’t we all happy happy to see that Condoleezza Rice may well be the next Rumsfeld. Such disarming people, the both of them!

At the Market today, farmers were engaged in political speculations (I only buy from Democrats. Honestly. It’s not that I disdain food coming from Red-tainted soil, it’s just that I have yet to MEET a Market farmer who voted for Bush). What now, why, where to... One young guy over at Harmony Valley was explaining to a customer how the only way this country can survive is if we take on seriously the task of providing information to people who are simply not knowledgeable about the crisis facing this country. He is sending his Bush-voting in-laws a subscription to the New York Times. I told him they either wont read it or call it a lefty rag. “No,” he said, “because I am not just a random person out there. I married their daughter. They like me. I can make inroads because they trust me. I tell you, this should be our mssion for the next 4 years: to educate those without access to hard facts. Education is huge!”

There’s a reason why it’s always refreshing to talk to farmers at the Market. They see their crops fail, they deal with droughts and flooded fields. And, if they at all can, they come back to it next year anyway.

Just two photos from the Market today – the post is obscenely long as it is. The first focuses in on the essence of a great Market: stacks of carrots, in the glow of a beautiful, sunny day. The other is more suggestive of things to come. The peppers are still there, but they are strung with seasonal pine cones. Damn. The Market changes, seasons change, but the president and vice president stay the same. Damn.



a gaggle of carrots, reaching for the warm rays of the sun Posted by Hello

peppers and cones with the yellow leaves of a lingering Fall Posted by Hello