I have started the laborious process of going back through my archives for this year, checking for the rare gem and the quite-frequent clunker, and right there on the very first day of 2008, I managed, in the midst of a whole mess of errors, to call the general tone of post-election analysis.
At the time I was leaning towards Edwards, although I really hadn't settled on a preferred Democratic candidate. In essence, I predicted the media would claim that, even the a Democrat had won the Presidency, there would be an emergent narrative that would declare the him a loser of sorts. He would be crippled by ideological battles, by circumstances, by a nation not ready for a Democratic President, etc., etc.
On the very day after Barack Obama won the election, Tom Brokaw started the ball rolling with the invented-from-whole-cloth notion of ours being a "center-right" country (whatever the hell that means). I noted on November 12 that some lefty-types around the internet were declaring the Democratic party defunct in two and four years because Barack Obama inherited a mess from George W. Bush. Mainstream journalists are giggling over other lefty-blogger types who are whining about this or that or the other cabinet choice, noting that the lefty-bloggers feel left out and cheated, thinking they won the election for Obama.
All of this emerging narrative of an embattled President-elect, hampered by ideological struggles within and disastrous conditions without, and the resulting emerging notion that Obama has no chance to govern effectively was predicted, despite a whole mess of details being wrong, by me. In January.
I'm doing the happy dance right now.
Virtual Tin Cup
