About last night

A friend at the radio show “Open Sources” invited me to write about how I experienced last night and how the elections results will affect me personally. I’m not sure any of our readers care about these matters at this point, but since a blog can also double as a diary I thought I’d go ahead.
The highlight of the evening came very early, at around 5:45, when I arrived at an internet cafe where CNN was hosting bloggers. I had declined to participate — I prefer to watch elections alone, expecially when I’m expecting a bad night — but wanted to drop by and see Scott and thank the folks at CNN for inviting me. As I said yesterday, CNN is a bad network staffed by some good people.
Anyway, when I identified myself at the door, the woman at the desk asked to see some identification. The thought that someone would impersonate a blogger was the highlight of my evening.
I spent about half an hour with Scott, during which I met or renewed my acquaintance with several conservative bloggers. I also met a few liberal bloggers who seemed, understandably, to be in good spirits. And I talked briefly with Christy Hardin Smith of Firedoglake, whom I have debated several times on C-SPAN. As she explained to a bystander, we’re the two lawyers who don’t shout at each other. I added: “C-SPAN seems to like that, and so do I.”
After thanking the CNN blog mavens, Jacki Schechner and Abbi Tatton for inviting me, I retreated to the friendly confines of my house. There, I had to contend not only with bad early returns, but with the technical problems plaguing Power Line on our “biggest night” of the year. The technical problems mostly went away; the bad returns never did.
By 7:45, it was clear that things would go poorly in the House. The demise of Rep. Northup in Kentucky and adverse results in Indiana strongly suggested that the Republicans would lose more than the two dozen seats I had anticipated. On the other hand, Republicans weren’t running far enough behind their “performance” in the late polls to suggest anything like a 1994-style blow-out.
My focus turned to the Senate, where the raw vote count gave me hope that the Republicans would hang on to 50 seats, as I had predicted (though without great confidence). However, things turned sour at around 10:45 when the incomparable Michael Barone looked at the precincts that were still out in Virginia and predicted that Allen’s lead would shrink to zero. Within half an hour, it seemed likely to me that the Dems would have their 50th seat. I was unhappy but, to my surprise, not that upset. As Tim Holt told Walter Huston in The Treasure of Sierra Madre, “the worst ain’t so bad when it finally happens.”
What will the results mean for me personally? Hard to say; I don’t think about politics that way. More anger and higher taxes, I guess.

Notice: All comments are subject to moderation. Our comments are intended to be a forum for civil discourse bearing on the subject under discussion. Commenters who stray beyond the bounds of civility or employ what we deem gratuitous vulgarity in a comment — including, but not limited to, “s***,” “f***,” “a*******,” or one of their many variants — will be banned without further notice in the sole discretion of the site moderator.

Responses