This Could Be the Last Post, This Could Be the Last Post....May Be The Last Post, I Don't Know (November 16, 2012)

No, this is not a song parody on the Rolling Stones’ “Last Time.”  I think I’m just being unduly influenced by the "Crossfire Hurricane” HBO documentary on them last night, which was wild.

There is really only one reason I have for doing one last “election post”…and that is, of course, to see who the lucky person is who provides the correct answers to the following three questions:

1)       Who will be the Democratic presidential nominee in 2016?

2)       Who will be the Republican presidential nominee in 2016?

3)       Who will win?

Please send me your guesses (tom@obameter2012.com)….I will keep them anonymous, duly record them on a spreadsheet, bury it in a four-year digital time capsule, unearth it (or whatever the electronic equivalent of “unearth” is) in four years, and reveal the genius(es) to the world.

I started to compile helpful lists of potential contenders but quit after the list, especially on the Republican side, started getting absurdly long.  But I still can provide modest service to you:  I would advise eliminating “David Petraeus” from consideration.  (Just a few week ago he might have been a very popular guess.  Who better to bridge the divide that is the Republican Party than Ike II?)

So, please send your guesses to me via email to tom@obameter2012.com.  The more the merrier.

I have been determined to find a few tidbits that you may not have already read in the mountain of post-election coverage.  Here are my three best:

• Remember Roseanne Barr, the very loud TV star of a hit show in the latter part of the 20^th century called, um, “Roseanne”?  Did you know that Roseanne Barr came in 6^th for the race for President of the United States?  That’s right, 56,349 Americans (and counting) exercised their precious right to vote by casting a vote for Roseanne Barr.  She was a candidate of the Peace and Freedom Party.

• Remember “Joe the Plumber” from the 2008 campaign?  Turns out Joe (actually his name was, and is, Samuel Werzelbacher) got bitten by the political bug as well.  He ran for Congress in Ohio’s 9^th District – and won.  Yes, you may have thought the freshmen members of the 112^th Congress were a little lame, but they just may outclass the freshmen of the 113^th.

• Remember the Kennedys?  The clan that saw one of its members serve in Congress for 64 years, from 1948 (when JFK was elected) to 2011 (when Patrick decided not to seek another term in Rhode Island).  Well, they’re baaaaaack!   Joseph P. Kennedy III (grandson of RFK) won Massachusetts’ 4^th District – Barney Frank’s old seat – and the scuttlebutt  is, Young Joe has the magic.  He’s 32, a former Peace Corps member and prosecutor.  And find a picture of him on Google Images.  He looks the part.  Check back with me in, oh, 2020, maybe he’ll make the VP short list.

Epilogue

Obama won Florida, so Nate Silver officially beat me!  Good call, Nate.  (Damn!) Seven House races remain “too close to call” or challenged or open in some way. 

Washington has quickly moved on to three juicy topics:

• The “fiscal cliff”…my favorite story was that Obama apparently called both McConnell and Boehner shortly after his victory speech on Election Night and was told (by who, I wonder) on each call that the man was asleep.  What a metaphor!  The outlines of a workable compromise have been signaled – tax “revenues” from the rich go up via closing loopholes or, more likely, capping deductions, but “rates” stay the same.  But this will surely come down to a Christmas Eve action (I really doubt they will stay in Washington through Christmas for a New Year’s Eve countdown to remember).

• The fate of the Republican Party.  Was Romney a bad candidate, or should the GOP modify its policies to better woo Hispanics in light of the swift and inexorable demographic shifts?  (That is, Hispanics are growing so fast that Republicans cannot ignore them, nor can they afford to offend women, blacks, gays and all other non-white-male voting blocks.)  Most of the chatter seemed to focus on the latter, and that Romney was a victim of the impossible primary-to-general-election gauntlet the GOP forces its candidates to run.  (Do you think Chris Christie is going to win the South Carolina primary?)

• And, of course, Petraeus.  I heard something on POTUS a few days ago that made me laugh.  On POTUS quite often it is basically the press interviewing the press, and in one of these interchanges the point was made was, basically, “thank god for Petraeus” because a sex scandal is far preferable to cover than the rather dry, wonkish fiscal cliff mess.

Closing Notes

I expect to be back on a very occasional basis, just to keep my hand in, but for now I am signing off.  This started as an email/newsletter that I inflicted (literally, they didn’t ask) on 15 or so friends and family.  I have to thank my friend Bob for turning it into a blog (without asking me!) in June and providing much technical assistance along the way.  I’m sure he regrets it now – as “Connecticut Republican” he also served the role of my foil, a vital “fair and balanced” counterweight to my leftist leanings.

I also must thank an array of guest bloggers, including Wick, Fran, Dave (another Republican friend), Wendy (more on her later) and, of course, Steve, who provided the absolute best commentary on the conventions and the debates that I read anywhere, period.

Many thanks to all of you as well…the best part of this was the many emails I received expressing support for the whole thing, along with the side commentary that supplemented, for me, the many online comments. Somehow that list of 15 people expanded to about 60, and somehow that list of 60 people ended up as 1,973 unique visitors who made 4,655 visits and read 9,258 pages.  Thanks to Allie and others who posted links on Facebook, and to Bob who introduced me to reddit.com!

Final thanks to Wendy for being my most passionate guest blogger, the site’s editor-in-chief (you would not believe how many grammatical errors she had to fix pre-post) and top supporter, even in the face of the ever-increasing encroachment the Obameter made on our lives!

Don’t forget to send me your guesses for 2016 (at tom@obameter2012.com)!  It will be upon us before we know it. But first, the fiscal cliff…the inauguration…the debt ceiling…the immigration bills…the midterms…