Stupid early exit polls. It’s not like I expected Virginia to go to Kerry, but I picked up a surge of optimism in the past few days, and even more this afternoon, that it would be surprisingly close and that that would bode well for the other races. Nope. It’s all close and Bush has Florida and it’s all about Ohio. I’m nervous.

UPDATE (12:16): Stupid exit polls. I’ve been doing a bit more poking around the Internet, especially the blogosphere, and the shift from afternoon-and-early-evening perspective to evening perspective is startling. “Slate’s”:http://www.slate.com current headline (“Kerry’s ahead in FL, OH, PA, WI, MI, MN, NM, and NH”) is just embarrassing for them.

I knew in my mind that the polls would be a mirage, but I was stupid and let them fuel my optimism. But part of my optimism, too, was an assumption that if the polls were wrong they’d be wrong in Kerry’s favor — that increased voter turnout and new voter registration would swing heavily his way. In reality: not so much.

It’s still all about Ohio, and I’m still nervous.

UPDATE (12:53): If I thought that by staying up I could get to see Kerry win in the next couple hours, I would. But that doesn’t look likely. Either Bush will win it or it’ll still be too close to call and there’ll be legal fun and games in Ohio — goodness knows there’s grounds enough for it. In any case, I’m going to bed.

Ella and I had to wait an hour and a half in line, but she was incredibly well-behaved, considering all the down time. California Tortilla’s giving a free taco to everyone with an “I voted!” sticker. Chipotle’s giving you a free burrito if you saved a receipt from the past few days (which I did). Oh, and Kerry’s up in the exit polls — he’s only down one point in Virginia! All in all, a good day so far.

No liveblogging from here, though probably some comments late tonight. And after that, I may even go back to blogging about roleplaying games and books and backgammon and stuff . . .

Some scattered thoughts on election’s eve:

1. You hear a lot that this is the most important election of our time. But it’s not. The one four years ago was — we just didn’t know it. Bush turned out to be a radical President, and there’s no doubt that things would look very different today if it had been Gore. 2000 was the big kahuna. This is just the election where we have a clue.

2. Even if the electoral college vote is decisive one way or the other, even if the victor is established tomorrow night without question, we will remain a nation evenly divided. A mere 55/45 split is enough to put a state out of play; a 60/40 split marks a state as an unassailable stronghold for the candidate in question. That works for electoral math, but how does it work when it comes to livin’ with your neighbors? If there’s a hundred people on your block and sixty of them like baseball and forty prefer football, then there’s no talk of the majority “dominating” — it’s an evenly mixed neighborhood, where everyone has to just get used to living around people they disagree with. That’s where we are, and that’s where we’ll be, even after an electoral blowout.

(I was going to save this for after the election, but Kevin Drum beat me to the punch, so I’ll lay it out now before the bandwagon gets too crowded.)

Goldwater was before my time, but I remember Reagan well enough. However you define “movement conservatism,” his presidency was its apex. “Conservative” stopped being a dirty word, and “liberal” started to become one. The notion that government action was, a priori, troublesome and suspect took root. Taxes became a “burden” that required “relief.” In terms of policy and in terms of language, conservatives succeeded in shifting the terms of the debate their way.

By movement conservatism I mean the long-term campaign to consciously return Republicans (especially the anti-government, socially conservative types) to and maintain them in power. That word is very important, because for the Grover Norquist wing of the Republican party, ideology and policy priorities take a back seat to getting power and holding on to it. Only by remembering that focus on the reigns of power can we make any sense out of conservative behavior during the Clinton years. He was, by all accounts, a moderate, but he was laid into as if he was a left-wing extremist. Well-coordinated operations that crossed and blended the boundaries between political and media operatives tried to dig up dirt out of his past. They mounted a blatantly sexist smear campaign against his wife. They started all this not as election season was ramping up, but at the very moment he took office.

Clinton ended up digging his own grave by lying about the Lewinsky affair, but even that wasn’t enough to get their guy elected President. It took recorded-setting amounts of money funneled to George W. Bush, a candidate carefully groomed for mass appeal over depth or substance. It took ruthless attacks on a kindred spirit to manage victory in the primaries. It took a lousy Gore campaign that distanced itself from Clinton to its detrement, among many other mistakes. And, of course, it took the Supreme Court. Bush won by a hair, but that didn’t stop him from grinding “compassionate conservatism” under his heel the minute he started appointing his Cabinet. With Bush, over the past four years, we have seen the endpoint of movement conservatism. He is where win-at-any-cost power politics will take you. He has been a hollow president, unconcerned with matters of policy, speaking only in the broad strokes of what passes in his own mind as “principle,” while all the time every move of his handlers is motivated always, first and foremost, by the goal of holding on to power. It has been a disaster.

Movement conservatism’s days are numbered no matter who wins the election. Fundamentally, its tactics are not those of a movement confident that the natural direction of change is heading their way. They are the tactics of people who know that history is not on their side, and that the only way to stay viable is to fight, tooth and nail, and never give up. This is admirable to the extent that their ends are good ones—which is to say, not very admirable at all. As Kevin notes, traditional conservatism is fast losing ground on social issues, especially gay rights, and the long-term solutions for Social Security and Medicare are going to involve bigger government in the years to come. Indeed, while people are perfectly happy to pay less taxes, they also want more from the government when it comes to a safety net, and the notion that you can have both is starting to wear thin.

When I think of movement conservatism these days I think of Bush and the machinery that got him into power. I think of Karl Rove, Tom DeLay, and Grover Norquist. They are the “they” behind movement conservatism, but they are not all Republicans. When I was a kid in West Michigan, our U.S. representative was Paul Henry, a Republican who happily got the votes of my parents and countless other local Democrats because he was a circumspect, principled legislator, universally admired. After his tragic death he was replaced by Republican Vern Ehlers, a former physics professor, whom my wife (a Democrat) was happy to work for for a number of years. Suanna then went on to work for Connecticut Republican Nancy Johnson, one of those moderate New England Republicans that used to be the heart of the party but are now a dying breed. They, and those like them, outnumber the party thugs. If they can be faulted it is only for not stepping up to resist the influence of movement conservatism on their own party.

If Republicans are smart they will realize that the train wreck of the Bush Administration is exactly where movement conservatism has taken them. They will see the writing on the wall, and change course. I think this is inevitable in the long run, but the movement won’t go down without a fight—the battles of which will make for some interesting politics in the first months of the Kerry Administration.

If Osama Bin Laden knew about an Al Qaeda attack in the works between now and Tuesday, he wouldn’t have released the tape he did. He would have remained silent, or he would have tried to spread fear by hinting at what was to come. Instead, we get this: a rambling message, at times incoherent, all in all, rather pathetic. More than anything else, it seems to me like a desperate political move — trying to make his voice heard, though he nothing to say.

In other words, the only importance of the tape, as far as I’m concerned, is that it means there’s not going to be an election-related terrorist attack. So get out there and vote.

Looking into my crystal ball, I see . . .

1. A Kerry win.

2. A full-court conservative attack on Kerry that, “as Matthew Yglesias notes”:http://yglesias.typepad.com/matthew/2004/10/the_sea_was_ang.html, will backfire in the long run. The thing to watch out for especially is when bad news comes out of Iraq and they actually have the gall to blame Kerry for it — I’m clenching my teeth already just thinking about it. They will not let up. It will make what they did to Clinton look like a cakewalk.

3. Partly because of this, partly because of a hostile Congress, and partly due to his own limitations, Kerry will not win a second term. He will run against John McCain and lose.

Now, I’ll take Kerry followed by McCain over Bush followed by _whomever_ any day of the week. And my crystal ball has been configured with the assumption that Kerry will be a competent President, but not a great one. Just in case he has some of that “great” potential, though, here’s some advice for him:

Senator Kerry, take advantage of the turmoil in the Republican party that will bubble up after their election loss. There are plenty of conservatives who are beyond fed up with Bush and will have little appetite for attack-dog politics over the next four years. Reach out to them. Be a genuine uniter-not-a-divider when it comes to your Cabinet. Ask Colin Powell to continue to be Secretary of State. You’ll piss off some wingers on your side of the fence, but you will also isolate the wingers on the other side, and it will be easier for people to see their attacks against you for what they are: the frothing at the mouth of the lunatic fringe. If you can pull this off, even if you don’t win a second term, your friend John McCain will have the opportunity to lead a Republican party that’s not an embarrassment to the nation.

One aspect of the missing explosives¹ story ought to be a shock at the fact that the Department of Defense was aware of them but all this time has kept a lid on the news, unwilling to share it with the IAEA or even the American people. Only a fledgling Iraqi government, starting to flex its muscles, was willing to let the IAEA know. But it’s not a shock, because if you’ve been paying attention, this is only the latest in a long string of examples of this Administration putting political expediency and self-preservation above sound policy, above the war on terror, above honesty, even above their own ideology.

Or maybe not. But the alternative to that viewpoint is something along the lines of “everybody is out to get George Bush,” with the understanding that “everybody” includes, most significantly, the Liberal Media, which is, in coordinated fashion, working as a de facto extension of the Kerry campaign. We’re left with that choice: EITHER the situation in Iraq has turned out badly due to not only a lack of planning but a complete lack of interest in planning on the part of Bush’s inner circle, OR the Liberal Media has it in for Bush and is harping on all the lousy news to make him look bad.

From The American Conservative, via Kevin Drum, we have a scene from a Cheney briefing:

The [CIA Counter Terrorism Center] concluded that Saddam Hussein had not materially supported Zarqawi before the U.S.-led invasion and that Zarqawi’s infrastructure in Iraq before the war was confined to the northern no-fly zones of Kurdistan, beyond Baghdad’s reach. Cheney reacted with fury, screaming at the briefer that CIA was trying to get John Kerry elected by contradicting the president’s stance that Saddam had supported terrorism and therefore needed to be overthrown. The hapless briefer was shaken by the vice president’s outburst, and the incident was reported back to [newly appointed CIA director Porter] Goss, who indicated that he was reluctant to confront the vice president’s staff regarding it.

In this case, EITHER the whole story is a fabrication from that cornerstone of the Liberal Media, The American Conservative, OR the CIA is making stuff up to try to get Kerry elected, OR Dick Cheney is (and has been) completely off his rocker.

What boggles my mind is the sheer scope of the conspiracy that must exist, in the media and beyond, to exonerate this Administration. Those wily left-wingers have not only misreported on Iraq, but they’ve managed to turn nonissues like Abu Ghraib and the outing of Valerie Plame into “scandals,” and they’ve coopted figures as diverse as Richard Clarke and Paul O’Neill. Plus the whole CIA. In order for Bush to be right, all those people, from the policymakers and Cabinet officials to the reporters and reporters’ bosses, must either be mistaken or deliberately wrong.

Belief in a conspiracy like that is out there, and may not even be all that uncommon. It is buttressed by good old-fashioned ignorance—The Program on International Policy Attitudes reports that “75% of Bush supporters continue to believe that Iraq was providing substantial support to al Qaeda.” (That’s only one of a laundry list of literally astounding statistics in their report.) I don’t think it’s too far out of line to suggest that these two things—habitual distrust on the media based on an assumption of systemic bias, and ignorance of basic facts about recent history—are related.

George Bush will be judged harshly—certainly by history, or sooner if he’s elected to a second term and must lie in the bed he’s made. At that point many of his supporters will admit, if only to themselves, that they were wrong. That is never an easy thing to do. People are extremely good at perceiving the world in ways that justify their decisions and confirm their assumptions, and adjusting that perception is often a painful process. Hopefully—for the good of the country and the world—enough of his former supporters can make that adjustment before November 2.

¹ (Josh Marshall has been all over it—start here and keep reading up for a synthesis of the whole situation and the subsequent reporting thereof).

Computer gamers (especially Doom fans) must not under any circumstances miss The Staging Point’s “audit from hell”:http://stagingpoint.com/archives/000393.html. Very funny. Hat tip to “Ed”:http://www.edheil.com/mmh/.

Some time after the third game, I heard an interview on the radio with a guy from Boston. His team was down 0-3, but he was still upbeat — “It’s all right,” he said. “All we’ve got to do is come back and win the next four.” He didn’t seem the least bit worried. _They’re doomed and he doesn’t know it_, I thought to myself. _There’s got to be a word for that_.

I was wrong. And there _is_ a word: it’s “hope.”

I’m not a sports guy. The end of Game 7 is the only baseball I’ve watched in years. But the Red Sox and a dude on the radio taught me a lesson about hope tonight. Thanks, guys. I’m rooting for you.

Neal Stephenson subjected himself to the ol’ “Slashdot interview”:http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/20/1518217 treatment, and the results are a splendid treat for all of us. Way better questions than the ones he was asked at signings while he was in town recently, and of course he has much longer, better answers too, since he has time to think and write them down. His disquisition on Beowulf writers and Dante writers is the second best thing in the interview, trailing only slightly behind the truth (at last!) about his battles with William Gibson:

The first time was a year or two after SNOW CRASH came out. I was doing a reading/signing at White Dwarf Books in Vancouver. Gibson stopped by to say hello and extended his hand as if to shake. But I remembered something Bruce Sterling had told me. For, at the time, Sterling and I had formed a pact to fight Gibson. Gibson had been regrown in a vat from scraps of DNA after Sterling had crashed an LNG tanker into Gibson’s Stealth pleasure barge in the Straits of Juan de Fuca. During the regeneration process, telescoping Carbonite stilettos had been incorporated into Gibson’s arms. Remembering this in the nick of time, I grabbed the signing table and flipped it up between us. Of course the Carbonite stilettos pierced it as if it were cork board, but this spoiled his aim long enough for me to whip my wakizashi out from between my shoulder blades and swing at his head. He deflected the blow with a force blast that sprained my wrist. The falling table knocked over a space heater and set fire to the store. Everyone else fled. Gibson and I dueled among blazing stacks of books for a while. Slowly I gained the upper hand, for, on defense, his Praying Mantis style was no match for my Flying Cloud technique. But I lost him behind a cloud of smoke. Then I had to get out of the place. The streets were crowded with his black-suited minions and I had to turn into a swarm of locusts and fly back to Seattle.

There’s much more in there, too. Go read.