It's a Grand Old Party. . .

It has been a good election year for the G.O.P.

When I posted the excerpt from President Bush's 2000 acceptance speech yesterday I had no idea we'd know by now who won this year's presidential election. To be honest, I didn't expect the Dems to give up that easily. The optimist in me says Kerry must have more character than I originally gave him credit for; the cynic says this is just one more example of excellent politicing on Kerry's part.

This was a very encouraging election, to me. The eleven states considering formal recognition of same-sex marriages all voted to ban them--including Oregon, which is the one state gay and lesbian proponents felt most hopeful about. It is so easy, living in Portland, to feel like there are no vestiges of sanity left in the world, but I am happy that the majority of Oregon was sane enough to define marriage once and for all as one man and one woman. Praise God for this outcome!

Obviously, we got the right guy in the White House. But we also picked up seats in both the House and the Senate. . . even unseating the tenacious Daschle in South Dakota.

I was also pleased that GWB won the popular vote as well as the electoral college. The news anchors reported that one in five voters said "moral values" was the number one issue guiding their voting choice, and out of those one in five, 80% of them voted for Bush. That says encouraging things about our country, I think. Maybe the younger voters the Dems had set their hopes on aren't as liberal as we thought.

Well, now we can all breathe a sigh of relief. . . until 2008, that is. *grin*