WHAT THE ELECTION TOLD US: FRANK RICH NYT

Frank Rich NYT:
Cliches that fell on Tuesday Night.
Every assumption by media before election was proved wrong after Tuesday night.

Obama's election put to rest these ideas: whites would lie to pollsters about their support (Bradley Effect)....but the polls were almost exactly right ( In fact Nate Silver who writes the fivethirtyeight.com site and whom I followed religiously before the election got the outcome exactly right-- to the tenth place) and white men voted for Obama at a higher percentage than any Democrat since Jimmy Carter. He won those states where the desperate beer swilling Hillary attempted to raise the race card and claimed: "He can't win!"

Jews wouldn't support a black named Obama..he got 78% of their support.

Hispanics were claimed to have "little affinity" for a black candidate, but Obama took their votes by 67 to 31-- a big jump over both Kerry and Gore in earlier elections.

For those who said the youth vote "would not show up"...but they did and in greater numbers than ever before!

And for those who thought that Sarah Palin was a brilliant "McCain coup" because (though she was a bumptious naive, unprepared air head) she "spoke the language" of the people and unsophisticated Americans would support her in droves. But they didn't and all the polls and the final one agree she cost McCain votes and as Rich states it: "she morphed from savior to scapegoat overnight".

Finally in Rich's own words:"The post-Bush-Rove Republican Party is in the minority because it has driven away women, the young, suburbanites, black Americans, Latino-Americans, Asian-Americans, educated Americans, gay Americans and, increasingly, working-class Americans. Who’s left? The only states where the G.O.P. increased its percentage of the presidential vote relative to the Democrats were West Virginia, Tennessee, Louisiana and Arkansas. Even the North Carolina county where Palin expressed her delight at being in the “real America” went for Obama by more than 18 percentage points.

The actual real America is everywhere. It is the America that has been in shell shock since the aftermath of 9/11, when our government wielded a brutal attack by terrorists as a club to ratchet up our fears, betray our deepest constitutional values and turn Americans against one another in the name of “patriotism.” What we started to remember the morning after Election Day was what we had forgotten over the past eight years, as our abusive relationship with the Bush administration and its press enablers dragged on: That’s not who we are.

So even as we celebrated our first black president, we looked around and rediscovered the nation that had elected him. “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” Obama said in February, and indeed millions of such Americans were here all along, waiting for a leader. This was the week that they reclaimed their country."

Read the whole piece at:http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/09/opinion/09rich.html?_r=2&ref=opinion&oref=slogin&oref=slogin