2004 Presidential Election

What can I say? I got the turnout right, sort of - not found any official figures on that yet.
But, Bush? Why oh why?

1. The Media - Still overwhelmingly obsessed with the idea that being patriotic is not questioning the President / Administration. They certainly had a go at times on his military record but not the real issues - Iraq, the fiscal defecit, healthcare etc.

2. Moral Majority / Christian Right - They came out to vote in enough numbers to add to Bush's 2000 total. The Democrats need to learn from this.

3. Kerry - Not compellingly different enough. Too much critisicm without presenting sufficiently different, alternative ideas (Very reminiscent of the problem the Tories have in the UK).

Of the post-match analysis, I liked this piece by Simon Schama.

I think the one thing that we, in the UK in particular, is that the US Presidential Election is not about policies and manifestos, it's a popularity contest and basically it's like this :

Presuming those dodgy e-voting machines worked properly and weren't tampered with - Just over half of the people who can be bothered voting in the US like a man with these qualities in charge :

Decisive - Refuses to admit any mistake or revisit any decision.
Poor Verbal Skills - No fancy words or rehetoric - simple aphorisms only please.
Nationalist and Unilateralist - The US does not need anything from the rest of the world right? Doh! Wrong. The USA needs money from the rest of the world invested in it in order to keep it's economy going. It also needs the rest of the world to sell it all the stuff that it consumes which the US does not manufacture - and there's a whole lot of that...

The bizarre thing to me about this result is it is kind of like the inverse of what happened with Labour and the Tories in the 80s, especially from a Scots point of view.
Then the North and Scotland voted for Labour but got the Conservatives because the richer folks in the South-East voted for them.
In the US the richest folks are more likely to be liberal (That damn Liberal Elite again....) so they vote Democrat. Meanwhile, all the poor folk who can't get jobs love Bush because he promises to protect them from the bogey men he likes to invoke to scare them, all the while he is taking dollars from their back pockets and passing them out to rich Corporations.

Here's hoping the other 35% who don't vote wake up and realise they are needed to swing this in a more sensible direction in 2008 for President (Mrs) Clinton the second....