Everything about this election said that we weren’t throwing out the rascals. Whoever won as President was going to have to deal with the current crop of rascals. Unless things changed radically as the polls closed going westward, we would have a Republican House, with probably the same margin as now, and a slightly Democratic Senate, with the Dems picking up one or two seats.
John McCain picked up the entire South, and almost all of the Midwest and the Rockies. Barack Obama took the Northeast, the West Coast, Illinois, and a big chunk of the Mid-Atlantic region. It was a repeat of 2004, with only a few variations. It finally came down to the Rust Belt. John needed to take either Ohio or Pennsylvania to lock it up. He took both, with Ohio being called at 11:15, and Pennsylvania not being called until almost dawn the next morning.
Despite the landslide appearance of the final Electoral College count, the popular vote count was not a landslide. John McCain had won the popular vote by only 51 % to 49 %, much lower than my numbers had been in 2004. I did not take this to mean I had run a better campaign, far from it. By any number of measures, John was a better campaigner than I had ever been. His problem was who he had run against. Barack Obama had been wildly popular to the Democrats. In the states that voted for him, especially in the Democratic strongholds, he commanded from 60 % to almost 70 % of the popular votes. It was a lot closer in some of the Southern states that John had won, where the black voter turnout had been high, and John had only scraped up percentages from just over 50 % to perhaps 55 %.
I wondered whether it would have been different if Hillary had won the Democratic primary. As far as the Republicans were concerned she was just as polarizing as Obama had been, but to the Democrats she was almost as popular as Obama was. It might not have been vastly different. Regardless, there was an air of excited exhaustion around our little conference room. We had won, which is a whole shitload better than losing!
I delayed calling either man until almost midnight, after we heard that Obama had called John and conceded. John I congratulated and promised to support, Obama I complimented on a good and tough fight. Politics 101. As I made the calls, I glanced over at the couch Marilyn was sitting in. She had fallen asleep about 9:30 or so, much to everybody’s amusement, and had only woken when she heard the final cheering. She gave us all a disgusted raspberry and then fell asleep again, sitting at the end of the couch, leaning against the armrest, head back, eyes closed, mouth open, and snoring. Stormy was sprawled out on the couch next to her, head in Marilyn’s lap, and she was sleeping, too. After I made the calls, I stood up and thanked everybody, and promised I would talk to them in the morning, and then tapped Marilyn on the shoulder. She snorted and shook herself awake, and I led her and the dog back up to the Residence for a decent sleep.
Epilogue
Marilyn and I hung around the White House for another few days, as I made phone calls to everybody and their brother and congratulated everybody. John McCain made a comment that he was going crazy as he began to get ready to take my job in a few months. I simply gave him an evil laugh and told him it would only get worse from here! Mitt Romney was going to lead his transition team. That usually meant that whoever was running the team was going to play a significant role in the future, usually in the Cabinet. That wouldn’t surprise me.
Me? I was tired! In seven years I think I aged twenty. I needed a serious vacation, and Marilyn agreed with me. By the end of the week, I told everybody they could do without me, and we headed down to Hougomont. As long as the world didn’t blow up before January 20, I didn’t care. John was welcome to the mess. I wondered if I had done a single damn thing to make the world a better place. I really couldn’t tell anymore.
I knew that John had four years to try to make an impact. By the time the 2012 elections rolled around, we would have had three straight Republican administrations, twelve years, an above average record. The big winners had been FDR and Truman, who had racked up twenty years, but that would never be seen again. Reagan and Bush 41 had done twelve years, and Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover had also done twelve years. To go to more than three terms in a row, you had to go back to McKinley, Roosevelt, and Taft (four terms), and before that to Reconstruction, when the Democrats couldn’t even run!
No, John would need to be a miracle worker to get a second term. The odds were that by the time of the next election, the economy would be in trouble, either because a bubble burst and we had a catastrophe, or he avoided bubbles but simply had a routine but ill-timed recession. In 2012 I expected a repeat of the fight between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, only Hillary would probably get the nod. The argument would be that Obama blew it against McCain, so let’s give the other team a chance.
Then again, maybe he could pull it off. I truly believed that Hillary wouldn’t be any better a President than Obama would be, or had been on my first go. It would be out of my hands in any case. From here on out, I wasn’t just a lame duck, I was a dead duck! There wasn’t much I could accomplish in the next couple of months, and after that, I could only offer assistance. If I volunteered without being asked, the term that would be used was ‘meddlesome old fart.’
The three of us (Marilyn, me, and Stormy) landed in Nassau, and immediately jumped into a car to head to Hougomont. Frank and his fiancé were with us also, taking a vacation as well. As far as I was concerned, vacations are for lazing around. I expected a short briefing in the morning, and everybody could wear shorts and t-shirts for that. The same went for the National Intelligence Officer who gave me the PDB every morning. Otherwise, go make yourself a rum punch and take a load off. Dinner is on the grill at 7:00. Be there or be square!
The next morning, Saturday, I slept late and woke up when Marilyn crawled out of bed to let Stormy out. After the mutt came back inside, she jumped back into bed with me while Marilyn went to take a shower. There was no going back to sleep, because Stormy decided to crawl on top of my chest and lick my face. That’s very cute when you are dealing with a puppy. When it’s a 140 pound monstrosity, it can cause pulmonary collapse! I pushed her off and restarted my breathing, and then got out of bed myself. I went into the bathroom and brushed my teeth and took my Lipitor while Marilyn showered.
When she got out of the shower, I jumped in and cleaned up. After that, I was about to shave when I noticed it was time to swap out my razor blade, so I hit the ‘Eject’ button and popped off the triple-track head, and chucked it in the garbage. I opened the medicine cabinet and rooted around for a new one. “Marilyn, do I have any razor blades?”
“I don’t know? Did you tell me you were running out?”
“I didn’t know I was running out.”
“And that’s my fault because?”
I rolled my eyes at that. Whether you are the President or a ditch digger, as far as your wife is concerned, it’s always your fault. I rubbed my stubble. “I suppose I can go a day without a shave.”
“Do you want the Secret Service to go out and buy some blades?” she asked. As silly as that sounded, they would much rather do that then send the motorcade out with me so that I could go to the drug store and buy razor blades. There was actually an elaborate procedure for that sort of thing, so that nobody would be able to predict where I bought things and then be able to sabotage them. Randomly selected stores would be used, with the purchases made under phony names and payments made out of anonymous accounts. Similar things occurred with food for the White House