New Yorker: Tribute to Kerry + a majority voted for Senate Democrats

From Hendrik Herzberg (New Yorker). Moving words in favor of Kerry. Plus, an important reminder: Republicans won the Senate, but Democratic candidates won more votes than Republicans.

"During the campaign it was routinely remarked that the Democrats’ fervor was rooted much more in anti-Bush than in pro-Kerry sentiments. That was certainly true at the beginning...It was far less true at the end. Grave and formal, steady and decent, more emotionally accessible as Election Day approached, John Kerry wore well. He earned the respect of his supporters and had begun to earn their affection... All Kerry needed to become thoroughly presidential was the Presidency. His supporters risked heartbreak, and they found it.
....
Though the Republicans won nineteen of the thirty-four Senate seats that were up for grabs last Tuesday, for a gain of four, the number of voters who cast their ballots for Republican Senate candidates was 37.9 million, while 41.3 million voted for Democrats—almost exactly Bush’s popular-vote margin over Kerry. When the new Congress convenes in January, its fifty-five Republicans will be there on account of the votes of 57.6 million people, while the forty-four Democrats and one independent will be there on account of the votes of 59.6 million people. As for the House, it is much harder to aggregate vote totals meaningfully, because so many seats are uncontested. But the Republicans’ gain of four seats was due entirely to Tom DeLay’s precedent-breaking re-gerrymandering of the Texas district lines
...
The red-blue split has not changed since 2000. This is not a center-right country. It is a center-right country and a center-left country, but the center has not held. The winner-take-all aspects of our system have converged into a perfect storm that has given virtually all the political power to the right; conservative Republicans will now control the Presidency, the House of Representatives, and the Senate so firmly that the Supreme Court, which is also in conservative hands, has abruptly become the most moderate of the four centers of federal power. The system of checks and balances has broken down, but the country remains divided—right down the nonexistent, powerless middle."

The article also contains a laundry list of the "sadness, puzzlement and apprehension" at the prospect of 4 more years of you-know-who.

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/?041115ta_talk_hertzberg

Isn't that what the texas repukes did? It's obvious that "the people" want to be represented by Democrats, some repukes got to go!!

Republican Senate candidates was 37.9 million, while 41.3 million voted for Democrats—almost exactly Bush’s popular-vote margin over Kerry. When the new Congress convenes in January, its fifty-five Republicans will be there on account of the votes of 57.6 million people, while the forty-four Democrats and one independent will be there on account of the votes of 59.6 million people.

Okay, so we can't do it unilaterally or only in Democratic states. But somehow we MUST ban partisan gerrymandering.

This is actually one thing I was really hoping for from a Kerry presidency. No, I doubt Kerry would have actually pushed for legislation, but his SC appointments would likely have ruled against gerrymandering and the practice would have been banned. It was upheld only in a 5-4 vote this year.

Two Senators per state is what is allowed!

Just like the electoral college, red state voters get voting welfare - the government gives them more power for less votes because they live in a certain area.

Too bad they don't believe in one person one vote.

"Along with the sadness, there is puzzlement. Incumbents, especially in time of war, have a built-in advantage. But this incumbent had led the country into a war, the war in Iraq, that half the public had come to see as a mistake, and had led the country down what more than half the public saw, in pollster’s shorthand, as “the wrong track.” The election’s outcome defies logic, and perhaps that is the point. The early analyses credited Bush’s victory to religious conservatives, particularly those in the evangelical movement. In voting for Bush, as eighty per cent of them did, many of these formerly nonvoting white evangelicals are remaining true to their unworldliness. In voting for a party that wants to tax work rather than wealth, that scorns thrift, that sees the natural world not as a common inheritance but as an object of exploitation, and that equates economic inequality with economic vitality, they have voted against their own material (and, some might imagine, spiritual) well-being. The moral values that stirred them seem not to encompass botched wars or economic injustices or environmental depredations; rather, moral values are about sexual behavior and its various manifestations and outcomes, about family structures, and about a particularly demonstrative brand of religious piety. What was important to these voters, it appears, was not Bush’s public record but what they conceived to be his private soul. He is a good Christian, so his policy failures are forgivable. He is a saved sinner, so the dissipations of his early and middle years are not tokens of a weak character but testaments to the transformative power of his faith. He relies on God for guidance, so his intellectual laziness is not a danger.