100 Things About the Election, Part IX

The continuing series of things I noticed during and after Election Day that I considered important. In no particular order...

69. You know, if the Red States really are "Jesus Land", wouldn't that make the Blue States Satan Land?

70. More riffs from Jonah Goldberg on the sore loser mentality that some Democrats appear to have adopted post-election...

"The election results reflect the decision of the right wing to cultivate and exploit ignorance in the citizenry," writes Jane Smiley, a woman who couldn't catch a clue if you used one as a pestle and her brain pan as the mortar. Smiley's now-famous hissyfit places a great deal of emphasis on the fact that the Republican base is "ignorant" while the Democratic one is enlightened. A similar point was made by the British Daily Mirror, one of whose headlines asked, "How Can 59,054,087 People Be So DUMB?"

One might ask if the Democrats really want to place so much emphasis on "ignorance" of the base as a defining difference between the parties. By all means let's break out the number-two pencils and pit the homeschoolers, tractor drivers, and Sunday-school teachers against the voters who wouldn't have shown up at the polls lest they miss a chance to meet P-Diddy.

Goldberg's got a point. We're dealing with a party that has voters who can't figure out a butterfly ballot. Not to mention the fact that they're the party who thought John Kerry was the "most electable" candidate they had.

71. Has Alec Baldwin finally left the country? I want to break out the champagne.

72. The DNC's search for a new party chairperson includes Howard Dean...

Dean, the former governor of Vermont who juiced up party activists last year by taking an uncompromising stance against the Iraq war, is among several Democrats who have begun to survey the more than 400 members of the party's national committee who will choose its next leader.

Terry McAuliffe, the current party chairman, has yet to officially call an election, but it is widely anticipated that the vote will happen in early February at the party's winter meeting.

Another prominent Democrat who has expressed an interest in the job is Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack. His allies worry that a Dean chairmanship would damage the party's ability to project a more acceptable image to skeptical independent voters.

Others say Dean's candidacy might harness the energy of Democrats to expand their base of support and to steadily add new and younger voters to its rolls.

Dean declined to comment on a potential bid today. Thousands of of e-mail petitions from Dean supporters encouraging him to run have been sent to his political organization's headquarters in Burlington, Vt., and Laura Gross, his spokeswoman, would only say that he was listening to what Democrats of all stripes have to say.

People should be jumping at the chance for this job. A baboon wearing rollerskates might have done a better job than Terry McAuliffe, unless McAuliffe's real job was clearing the field for Hillary Rodham Clinton's Presidential bid in 2008.

God, just typing those words scares me.

73. You know, the last three Democratic Presidents came from Arkansas, Georgia and Texas. And Al Gore would have won the 2000 election if folks in his reported home state of Tennessee actually believed he came from Tennessee. Instead, the Democrats chose to run Michael Dukakis' former Lt. Governor this year. Maybe they can track down the Massachusetts Secretary of Transportation for 2012.

74. AllahPundit's caption is wrong. Here's Derek Jeter, telling us how many more years of George W's leadership we shall receive.

75. Back to Election Night. Is it just me, or was Wolf Blitzer walking around the CNN stage weird as hell? Every other anchor sat a desk. I guess this was intended to set CNN's coverage apart from the competition, but the generally lousy coverage did that by itself.