Are We There Yet? Are We There Yet?

It’ll all be over soon, but the drinking. The champagne if it goes one way, whatever makes you pass out faster if it goes the other way. Some bar must have a Joe the Plumber or Caribou Barbie shot ready for us in case we need to be put out of our misery. Not likely, but I’m hyper superstitious right now. I still won’t declare victory until it’s actually declared. And today will be extra long for me as a result of it. Bated breath is starting to feel like a permanent state of being. So I’ll stick to the inane until I wake up tomorrow and know whether this is a dream or a nightmare. I had committed myself to write something every week day during my sabbatical; I didn’t commit to it all being good.

Joe the fucking Plumber? That’s a new low in a campaign. The celebrity of him, I mean. After McCain tried to compare Obama to Paris Hilton and Britney Spears he inflates a nothing into national celebrity? And Joe’s his role model? That’s going down in the annals of ridiculousness. If McCain were to end up in the White House, is he going to give Joe a staff position? It can’t be White House plumber, because the guy’s unlicensed. And it can’t have anything to do with money, since the guy’s a tax scofflaw. I know, court jester! Wait, I think Sarah Palin is actually qualified for that job.

I doubt any McCain supporters will remember this, but Obama made a big deal about texting anyone who wanted when he was officially declared the nominee. What was this all about? Getting cell phone numbers. The youth vote generally don’t have land lines, they only have cell phones. This means they don’t get included in the major polls. But Obama’s campaign has those cell phone numbers so his campaign’s polling is probably a lot more accurate, and a bit higher.

Overall, Facebook has been fascinating for me for this election season. I live in the liberal bubble of Seattle so I didn’t really know McCain supporters at all until my friends list exploded after my high school reunion.

I wonder if Battlestar Galactica will come up in the profanity case before the Supreme Court. If you don’t watch the greatest show that ever hit television, I’ll explain the relevance. BSG has in its vernacular, frack. This word is used exactly as the majority of us use the word fuck. Frack me, frack you, mother fracker, what the frack, and on and on. And the FCC can’t do a damn thing about it because they’ve so narrowly focused on the word, not the meaning. Language evolves. The FCC is “protecting” children from nothing by such narrow mindedness.

It’s tempting to bemoan money in political campaigns. And there are problems. But money is the currency by which speech is enabled. Sometimes it doesn’t take a lot of money (the launch of the blogosphere), sometimes it takes a lot (Obama’s network infomercial). But like everything else in this country, money is the means by which a message gets out. Tinkering with the system will never end, of course, but it’s also important to remember that money is speech as well. Ah, the complicated Constitution in our times.

As far as I know, I don’t know anyone who is voting for Prop 8 in California. I hope I never know anyone who would vote for it.

Happy election day and night!