As I talk to friends and read blog entries about trips to visit family for Thanksgiving, and decompress from the visit I just had from my ex-wife on her own way to a Thanksgiving feast with her new partner's family, I'm struck by the fact that while I feel melancholy, it's not over my family being gone, it's over not having a partner to share the holidays with. I'm a sentimental ninny -- I will go on a Christmas window outing every year, decorate a tree, see Handel's Messiah, and generally enjoy strolling around my East Village neighborhood streets where trees and lampposts are strewn with strings of little white lights and boutique after boutique offers the perfect gift for that hard-to-get-a-gift-for friend. The nip in the air, the smell of soup, fogged windows from warm bodies inside: all put a smile on my face. For me, the holiday season never led to suicidal states. It was always a Good month, annoyingly interrupted by a few one-day family events. Those days could be horrific, but I didn't generally blame the season for them. Family holidays have faded into background memory. My family of semi-choice is more fun. But this year, despite my life being good, and despite its being the fourth holiday season in a row that I'm single, it feels different. I think the fact that my life is good may be the reason my singleness is more problematic. These last few years, I have given the holidays far …

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November 7, 2004

I did not work for Kerry, though I was hoping he’d win. I’m in politics, and I used that as an excuse—I was already working for the cause, so I didn’t need to also work for Kerry. But the truth is I had no desire to. When Dean was running, I found time to help his campaign; somehow, I didn’t find that same time for Kerry. This despite my intimate knowledge of the stakes involved.

I have been in formal and informal meetings these last few days that inevitably turn into post mortems on the election, and several times I’ve heard people echo my reaction: annoyance at the fact that I ever let myself be OK with Kerry being the candidate. When this whole thing started, Kerry was down near the bottom of my list (just above Gephardt). I made myself see things as positively as I could and hoped his wishy-washy style was tied to his role as a senator—that once he was President he would change gears—but I honestly doubted it. The flip-flopper charge against him started in the Dean campaign and I agreed with every word. Sure it’s hard to have to defend a Senate record, with all the inevitable compromises. But many aren’t as muddled as Kerry’s, and maybe the Senate isn’t the right pool to pull presidents from. Maybe it happens so rarely for a reason. But in the end, I speculated that Kerry might be the Democratic …

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This is really fascinating and made me feel a lot better. There have been all these maps all over the media showing the vast red expanse and little strips of blue on the northern coasts. This map is the real story though. Regions are distorted to match area size to population, and shades of purple represent mixed red/blue for areas where the vote was close, most of which show as red on other maps even though the republicans won my a narrow margin. Note that there are many areas that are heavily blue-Democrat and only a very trivial number of areas that are solid red-Republican. I looked them up on the non-baloony version of the map and the one near the top left that looks like a Star Trek Federation badge is Utah, and the vertical line to its right a bit is the vertical strip of South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas and northwest Texas. The site where you can find this and the other views, and commentary about the statistics, is here: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/. I sure wish our media treated things like this with an approach of helping people understand the data, rather than just spewing misleadingly simplistic facts.

Whether Bush wins and is a lame duck or loses and is blamed for the loss, we are perhaps about to witness the end of the Republican Party as we know it -- the coalition of fiscal libertarians and social conservatives. The combination has never made sense and only worked when they were united against Communists and 60s radicals, which is now irrelevant. It is only the support of the fiscal conservatives and traditionalists that has given the radical right a legitimate voice in American politics these past few decades. About 3/4ths of Americans are liberal on social issues and I believe we are about to embark on an extended run of responsibly liberal governance that will bring us back in line with Europe and the rest of the "developed" world. I was talking with a friend from England last night and she said that while, of course, there are people and politicians in Europe who have radical right views, they know they have no shot at controlling the government and overturning liberal values like the social welfare contract and choice and gay rights. Not to get too blue-skyey, but I see us picking up the thread we let go of in the morass of the 70s and continuing our political evolution: reaffirming society's responsibility to its weaker members, reengaging the world community, rejoining the environmental movement.

My god-awful attempt at a Martha Stewart costume: