All Over But the Crying

Well, McCain got destroyed. Unfortunately (for me), my prediction that the hotly-contested Democratic primary and the cake-walk GOP primary would lead to a strong Dem campaign and a weak GOP campaign turned out to be pretty much right.

Before the gloating and the commiserating, I've got my picks for winners and losers in this election (since I lost, I'll put losers first):

LOSERS:
1. John McCain: he ran a back-assward campaign that stumbled often, he failed to rally his own party and showed he was anything but a leader of conservatives.

2. The GOP: after showing the country they were no better in power than the democrats they ousted, the GOP is now a minority in state houses, Congress, the Senate, and the White House. Their primary candidates were all pretty lousy too.

3. Laissez-faire economics: from McCain's jaunt to Washington, DC to "save the economy" to the Bail Out to Obama's open embrace of wealth redistribution, it's clear that laissez-faire is no longer mainstream in any American political party.

4. The Press: the idea that the press is "biased" is a complete joke; this year the press ran an open guerrilla campaign for Obama, actively withholding information and publishing factual inaccuracies. Now the Republicans will constantly cry Media Bias, but because Obama won, it will all be somehow meaningless and meanwhile, the media seems to have lost all semblance of dignity and impartiality.

5. The "switchers," from those helped cram McCain down conservative's throat (i.e. Chris Buckley) to those who formerly launched all kinds of invective towards Obama (i.e. Peggy Noonan) all kinds of conservatives revealed themselves as nothing but opportunists and attention-mongers.

WINNERS
1. Barack Obama: he befuddled the Clintons and swept the country in a landslide, the man might be the preeminent politician of our day, and that's saying something coming on the heels of Clinton and W.

2. The Democrats. They now run the country. Good luck.

3. Rhetoric. "Obama is a good speaker" was the reason one woman at my office voted for him.

3. Class Warfare: Obama openly espoused it, as did several Senatorial and Congressional candidates and...America embraced them for it.

4. Hope: The effervescent feeling won.

5. Horatio Alger (without the boy-touching stuff): America is the place where anything can happen, including the election of a half-African Socialist, half-Kansan graduate student to President of the United States.