I was surprised to see the folks at NBC award Florida to Vinick in the West Wing presidential election, even before Leo’s untimely death.
This only shows how pervasive the whole red state/blue state stereotypes have become, and how, like most generalizations and simplifications, they are both wrong and self-perpetuating.
Gore won Florida in 2000 – BEELEEVE it! The final result — the absolute best you could say for Bush, even with all the revisionist shenanigans — was 48.8% for Bush to 48.8% for Gore.
In 2004, even with the world’s worst Democratic candidate on the ticket (sorry Jon), for whom I myself could just barely stand to cast my vote, and could only do so by reminding myself repeatedly just how bad Bush was in comparison to Herman Munster-Kerry, a minimum of 47.1% of Floridians were able to force themselves to do the same, depending on whether you believe exit polls or Diebold machines.
Kerry lost Hispanic votes nationwide, and I think that had less to do with Bush’s appeal than with Kerry’s awkward, New England Yankee elitism. It’s the same reason all those people said they would rather quaff a beer with Bush — Kerry just wasn’t one of us.
But the fictional Santos is, and despite slanted redistricting, real-life Republicans aren’t a slam dunk in the Sunshine State. And even though in the 2000 census only 2.3% of the total 16.8% of Floridian Latinos were Mexican-American, you can depend on Florida to line up behind a legitimate Latino/Hispano/Cubano/and even Mexicano candidate.
Santos would have won Florida. I hope in 2008 we have a real choice again, and I am proven right. And Diebold is out of the picture.
Hey, when did I become a Kerry fan? I wasted a vote on Wes Clark in CA primary so as not to vote for him or Edwards. I did pick Kerry as a winner based strictly on his hair but even an Andrew Jackson coif right off the $20 bill is not enough.
Ironically, I was switching back and forth last night between West Wing and a C-SPAN book talk with Mark Crispin Miller (The Bush Dyslexicon) in which Miller said he’d spoken to Kerry and that now even Kerry thinks the vote in Ohio was stolen in 2004. Lot a good that does us now.
And last week, Kerry was on the cable newsers talking about his plan to get out of Iraq. But when Wolf and Tweety asked him about Bush’s leaking classified info to Judy Miller DeLay’s resignation, Kerry went into his standard fence-straddling waffle mode. At least he did say he’d vote for Feingold’s censure of the president.
Nine o’clock is way past my bedtime, plus I’d read a spoiler somewhere that Vinnick won the election so I didn’t make it to the end but was up long enough to see that California, which has 2 million more Dems than Gops, went for Vinnick, the Republican — and Texas, with its equally lopsided number of Republicans over Dems went for Democrat Santos — so you know it’s a TV fantasy.
NEVER NEVER NEVER cast an electronic vote. Vote absentee or demand a paper ballot. That is one way we can take our government back.