Election Day Wrap Up

Needless to say, I am thrilled that Barack Obama was elected the 44th President of the United States. He’ll have a lot on his plate, and he will have to also manage expectations as the bar has been set high. But I feel confident that the American people will support his efforts to pull this country out of the hole of the last 4 years of the Bush administration.

I’m happy that my home county – Lake County, Ohio – went blue, with the majority selecting Barack Obama. But, to prove that every vote really does count, the vote count was very close between Obama and McCain: (the numbers are from the Lake County Board of Elections)

Barack Obama/Joe Biden (DEM) 52,556 49.11%
John McCain/Sarah Palin (REP) 52,431 49.00%

Also a plus is that the state of Ohio has now also turned blue, with 51% of the vote going to Obama. There were also no major problems (only tiny ones) in the voting process in Ohio, and many polling places finished their counts very quickly. A welcome change from 2004.

The balance of power in the House and the Senate has also shifted to the Democrats. I’d say that the American people spoke loudly with their votes and wanted change all throughout the government.

Now, on to the TV coverage. I was a little crazed last night when, sometime after at about 6:15 PM, our NBC affiliate in Cleveland, WKYC, developed some audio problems on the HD channel. And when I switched to the regular, non-HD channel, the picture was horrible. I suspect it was a problem with the Time Warner cable, not with WKYC. After a while, I couldn’t watch the regular channel because the picture was so bad, and switched over to watch ABC. I have to admit that I actually liked ABC’s coverage. Sometime after 9:00 PM (I think) we got audio back on NBC/WKYC and I switched to their coverage. They had their “green screen” set in full force and even though I knew the images were all graphics and computer based, it looked slick. Sadly to say, though, my brain hit overload at about 9:30 and I developed a horrible migraine from trying to watch all the images, results, crawl lines, etc. all over the screen. Shortly after they called Ohio for Obama, and shortly after I took an Imitrex, I went to bed, knowing that if Ohio went blue that I would be waking up to a President Obama.

During a local election update, my husband switched on Fox (Faux) News just for a minute to see how they were calling things. The electoral maps looked close, if not identical, to what we saw on NBC and ABC, but the commentators were clearly trying to pump up McCain’s chances. After watching two minutes of it we laughed at their coverage, came to our senses, and changed the channel back to NBC. I wonder how Fox News will be able to handle 4 years of criticizing our new president? I am sure that even when things go right, they will find something negative to say. They always do. Maybe they will get lucky and Elizabeth Hasselbeck will leave The View and go work for them, so all the negativity can be in one place and we can all vote with our remotes and turn them all off.

I wish Senator McCain well. I wish Sarah Palin would just go back to Alaska, and stay there.

So that’s it for now. Interesting times are ahead, that’s for sure. And I’m looking forward to getting our country out of the quicksand and back onto solid ground.


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