The aftermath
I went up to Dublin on Tuesday for an election night party hosted by the U.S. Embassy, staying up until 5 A.M. (midnight EST), and spent yesterday in Dublin. I got to meet a few Americans, and even better, quite a few libertarian Irish, including some of the younger people from the Irish Freedom Institute. I met a few Democrats as well, generally nice people. There was a bit of initial unpleasantness as the results starting coming in, with some booing and heckling as good news for opponents came in, but fortunately an implicit truce was declared and each side settled for sticking to cheering its own good news.
The worst moment of the trip: as the evening wore on, it became clear that the exit polls were wrong, and some of the Kerry supporters were unsurprisingly not taking those dashed hopes well. By 3 A.M., it became clear that Bush had taken Florida, was likely to win Ohio, and therefore the election. One young woman in the Kerry camp was in tears. I felt bad for her. As a teenager in Chicago, I worked for a lot of anti-Democratic machine candidates, and I worked for McGovern in ’72 and Reagan in ’76, so I am very familiar with losing elections I care a lot about. It feels rotten. (I recall reading that after his ’84 loss, Mondale asked McGovern how long it took to get over that bad a loss, and McGovern replied that he would let him know when he found out.) There are people who really and truly deserved to be kicked when they are down: David Norris (if you are not Irish and unfamiliar with the nasty bigot, be grateful), George Galloway, Al Sharpton, Ted Kennedy, Dick Durbin, Michael Moore, the Bush=Hitler creeps. But the bulk of Kerry supporters are not that kind of gross cretin, and did not deserve the nasty shock of the messed up exit polls. The woman in tears was young, and I hope she learns that a huge advantage of living in a democracy is that you can always hope you will do better next time. (An good thing to remember today, the 48th anniversary of Soviet tanks rolling into Budapest.)
The best moment of the trip: sitting on Wednesday morning in a McDonald’s on Dublin’s Grafton Street (a lovely place), and hearing two young guys behind us talking. One grumbled that after getting his first paycheck and seeing how little was left after all the taxes were deducted, he was not a socialist anymore. The law of demand is powerful.