One optimistic note: when I finally got home, I saw a tired and chastened-looking John McCain on CBS, quietly and forlornly repeating his conclusion that Republicans were punished in large part for straying from the reformist principles of ’94. I don’t know if that’s precisely accurate — it may have just been the public’s weariness with the war — but this comment was an early indication that McCain may run for president in 2008 on a Contract-with-America-like, budget-cutting, reformist platform. If either he or Giuliani defeat New York Sen. Hillary Clinton (or whoever it may be) in ’08 with a perceived mandate for budget-cutting, government downsizing, and tax cuts, my patience will not have been in vain. If all those issues fall by the wayside, on the other hand, it may be time to start voting party-line Libertarian in ’08, so I can at least lose with dignity in the future.
TODD SEAVEY author of Libertarianism for Beginners and writer of/speaker about many other things
Saturday, November 11, 2006
How I Spent Election Night 2006
I spent the night of the ’06 elections making my way up Manhattan’s East Side, stopping by four different Republican parties — at least two that had been perfunctorily and overoptimistically billed as “victory” parties — shaking hands with losing New York state senate candidate Dan Russo, watching Jeanine Piro give her depressingly generic concession speech after her defeat in the state attorney general race by the tough and demagogic Andrew Cuomo, eating some free pasta after a nice thank-you speech to supporters by losing state senate candidate Philip Pidot (like old Justice League villains, all the partying Republican candidates that night seemed to have had names ending in an “oh” sound), and arriving at the Metropolitan Republican Club just in time to watch the last few people present react glumly to TV coverage of the election results, before finally walking a few blocks to home. It is healthy, at least, that I encountered few people engaged in the usual old Democrat-bashing boosterism and giddy praise for the home team, so I suspect the Republicans will at least be doing some serious self-examination, even if they don’t always reach the right conclusions.
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[...] •One other small point in McCain’s favor: readers with unnaturally good memories may recall that in this blog’s first entry, posted right after the 2006 elections — even before the blog was officially unveiled to the public — I said that my greatest consolation after seeing the Republicans deservedly ousted from control of Congress was that a chastened-looking McCain was already on TV saying that this was punishment for forgetting the spirit of 1994, which he wanted the Republicans to recapture (and which I’ll write about in this coming Friday’s Retro-Journal entry). [...]
[...] That was also the half-year during which I posted my first, experimental blog entry on ToddSeavey.com, recounting my experience of Election Night (though I would not begin blogging on a regular basis for another four months). As it happens, that first ToddSeavey.com blog entry bears a strong resemblance to my first AlarmingNews.com blog entry, posted today (a guest entry, done while Karol Sheinin is on vacation, about how I went from anticipating a Giuliani presidential victory to rooting for Libertarian Bob Barr over the past two exhausting years — and note that the non-embedded link in the middle of it as I write this was not my fault, but whether Karol can fix it from Italy remains to be seen). [...]
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