After the presidential elections of 2000 and 2004, I became acutely aware of how voter fraud and suppression are perpetrated and how the simple process of tallying a majority can get so damn complicated. I don’t doubt that it happened again yesterday, that there were places where voters were intimidated, places where good citizens were confused for felons, places where the vote just didn’t work. And I don’t doubt that it will happen again. I fear this is just an inherent assumption of the millennial voter.
But those practices don’t scale, not for a margin of victory like this. I undertook my birthday rituals — noodles, haircut, and more liquor than advisable — but I don’t know how to celebrate something like this, how being in a majority is supposed to feel, how to feel when something I’ve wanted for years is uncompromisingly, by law, scheduled to happen. It wasn’t just some random lesser-of-two-evils Democrat who won but the one who when I watched the DNC keynote in 2004 I knew instinctively had to be president in my lifetime.
And that instinct, over time, was confirmed with a political platform and manner reasonably proximal to mine for him to earn my vote yesterday morning. And though I may come to regret this decision in November 2012, I doubt it. I know this feeling well, perhaps too well, and for as improbable to me as that outcome is four years from now, I regret more now the times in my life I was certain of a future but unable or unwilling to defend my vision. Yesterday’s euphoria was borne of that vindication, that private victory that marked the end of my September, writ large for over 63 million people hardly a month later.
When I left the Lutheran Church of the Reformation on East Capitol Street yesterday morning, I put my headphones back on and the Kinks’ “This Time Tomorrow” was playing. And it asks, this time tomorrow, where will we be? This time tomorrow, what will we know?
Over dinner, I raised a glass to victories, big and small, for us to celebrate something everyday. When I left Bourbon, not even last call when Obama had finished his victory speech, I told the cab driver my address and sat silently for the ride home through a light rain. I don’t know how to celebrate something like this. All I got for my birthday was a big, stupid grin and I’m still wearing it.
I woke up at 9 am to my Umbrella Today message, half an hour ahead of my alarm. E Street was strafed with jackhammers. I’ll retire FiveThirtyEight from my daily surfing, frame the cover of my DC Voter’s Guide. And the big, stupid grin: I could get used to it.
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