Some Reflections on Election Night

Like many of you I was on pins and needles all day yesterday as some of the early numbers came in. Frankly, I was very discouraged upon hearing the exit poll numbers, and for a while there thought Kerry was going to walk away with this thing.

Thankfully, the exit polls were junk - and probably rigged to give Kerry some momentum. If there isn't an investigation into those polls, I'll be very angry. Many states were called later than they should have been because the exits had showed Kerry winning when in fact he lost by several percentage points.

I left the office early, headed straight home, turned on Fox News and fired up the laptop. Basically from 4pm until midnight I was glued to the TV and to several websites that I was monitoring at the same time. I was greatly encouraged as the real votes began to come in and Bush began to pick of state after state.

One aggravation was the reluctance of the networks to call certain states, including a number safe Bush states that were no brainers. I'm sure had Kerry been leading by the numbers Bush was, the nets would have called those states much earlier. It was clear early on that Florida and Ohio were going for Bush, but nobody wanted to make those declarations (in fact, some nets still haven't called Ohio).

One major regret I have about last night - Bush didn't get to give a victory speech and Kerry didn't concede. In every presidential election I can remember (except 2000), the winner was able to take the stage on election night and proclaim victory. Bush will never get to have that experience. His speech in 2000 wasn't made until mid-December, and even then it was purposely kept low key. His speech this time will be more joyful, but will be somewhat anticlimactic after waiting for so many hours.

By the way, I'm going to take a crack at writing Bush's victory speech the way I would do it if I had just won re-election following the dirty campaign waged by the Dems and their cohorts. I'll post that a little later. It probably won't sound like what you'll hear from Bush.