Ohioblog: A Swing State Journal

The more things change, the more they remain the same 

President Bush paints a clear line of demarcation. He says the world changed on 9/11. Thousands of Americans died that day at the hand of terrorists. More than a thousand others have died in a faraway land fighting a war the president has tied to 9/11 like a can to the tail of a dog. But the president is wrong about one thing: Not everything in the world changed on 9/11. If you look at the electoral map with its red Republican states and blue Democratic states, it looks at this hour much as it did four years ago when Ohio fell into place for George W. Bush and he went on to win the a contested presidency in Florida. Everything has changed, and nothing has changed. At 1 a.m., MSNBC projected that President Bush would win Ohio. Alaska followed quickly and that, if MSNBC is correct, guaranteed the president a minimum of 269 electoral votes and a tie for the presidency, which he would win on a vote of the Republican House of Representatives. Ohio, as we Ohioans had expected, made the difference. MSNBC's exit polls indicated that this was because moral values count more than anything else with voters, and Evangelical Christians turned out in large numbers and voted almost exclusively for the president, even if they didn't like everything about the way he runs the country and what it has meant for Ohio's incredible shrunken economy of 260,000 lost jobs. People like the way President Bush runs his life, and that is enough for them. Ohioans have shown themselves to people of the spirit more than of the mind. George W. Bush is their man and their president.
posted by Ohioblog: A Swing State Journal at 1:35 AM