{"id":4888,"date":"2008-11-05T16:55:13","date_gmt":"2008-11-06T00:55:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/?p=4888"},"modified":"2008-11-05T21:31:02","modified_gmt":"2008-11-06T05:31:02","slug":"glad-to-be-wrong-about-the-election","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2008\/11\/05\/glad-to-be-wrong-about-the-election\/","title":{"rendered":"Glad to be Wrong about the Election"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m not about to give up my Pundit Guild card yet but I&#8217;m here to own up to some bad prognosticatin&#8217;. Early this year I wrote a series of blog posts arguing that the Democratic Party (which I&#8217;ve viewed as the lesser evil, in this era of\u00c2\u00a0&#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.lewrockwell.com\/rockwell\/red-state-fascism.html\">Red State Fascism<\/a>&#8220;) was risking losing the election by running either a woman or black person. I wrote, for example, the intentionally overconfident title &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2008\/02\/18\/the-coming-mccain-victorys-lesson-for-antiwar-democrats\/\">The Coming McCain Victory&#8217;s Lesson for Antiwar Democrats<\/a>,&#8221; and gave Obama a one-in-four chance of winning. So what went wrong (or, rather, <em>right<\/em>)? Obviously there was the collapse of the stock market, the drop in real estate prices, the bank failures, and the federal bailouts. McCain had a brief post-convention lead in the polls and then just before the election came the deluge of terrible news, which was blamed largely on the Republicans. Still, in retrospect, I think my analysis was flawed. I noted that Bush won every state in Dixie in both 2000 and 2004, while losing big in non-Dixie America. And I noted that Dixie-as-kingmaker was a new phenomenon. But somehow I failed to realize that this Republican regionalism was a weakness, particularly considering Bush&#8217;s narrow victory in 2000, when he ran as a moderate, Gore ran as a not-very-believable populist, and Nader ran as a liberal vote magnet. I now believe that Bush&#8217;s 2004 victory was probably largely due to voters&#8217; desire to\u00c2\u00a0 appear resolute after the 9\/11 attacks, and during two deadly military occupations. I just hope I was right about the &#8220;lesser evil&#8221; part&#8230;.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m not about to give up my Pundit Guild card yet but I&#8217;m here to own up to some bad prognosticatin&#8217;. Early this year I wrote a series of blog posts arguing that the Democratic Party (which I&#8217;ve viewed as the lesser evil, in this era of\u00c2\u00a0&#8220;Red State Fascism&#8220;) was risking losing the election by [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-4888","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4888","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4888"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4888\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4890,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4888\/revisions\/4890"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4888"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4888"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4888"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=4888"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}