If McCain Wins

As things begin to look better and better for McCain, I’m actually starting to get worried about the reactions that will follow if McCain does pull this one off. If he loses, oh, well, I don’t think that people on the right will be all that distraught- they’ll make a big deal about it, they’ll complain about it, but they’ll move on. Conservatives don’t put all of their trust in the government or worship their candidates, as a general rule, so the idea of having one that they dislike is tolerable to say the least. But, if McCain wins, as Russ Smith puts it:

I have no clue if or when that could happen, but I do have an opinion of what will follow in this country if McCain pulls off what so recently seemed the miraculous feat of becoming the country’s 44th president. Voter fraud, conspiracy, “sleazevertisements” (the preferred term of many left-wing bloggers), disenfranchised voters, the return of redneck chic; those will be the immediate cries of Democrats who thought the election was in the bag. Once again, scores of celebrities will claim they’re moving abroad (and inevitably won’t). And then the depression will kick in hard.

Silly and irrational as all of the Bush 2000 election rhetoric wound up being, I do think that it really hurt the country that so many people were so tied up in hatred of everything that he stood for the entire two terms. Had liberals not been able to tie themselves up emotionally in the idea that Bush’s entire presidency was illegitimate and unfairly won, then I think that the country would not have been so divided, and perhaps we could be in a better place, in terms of world support and the war efforts.

Here, if McCain wins, even if it is decisively, there are already too many ready made arguments (racism, redneck-ism, etc) that liberals can cling to in the same way that they have during the Bush presidency, and they are so tied up in Barack our savior that many simply cannot believe that he could lose this election on the merits. And the crying, and fussing, and gnashing of the teeth will be nearly intolerable.

Finally, Tucker Carlson, the witty veteran of cable television shows, who’s been mercilessly and unfairly maligned by left-wingers, expressed an opinion that’s close to my own. “Even those who supported Hillary in the primaries will scold the rest of us for voting against a black man. They’ll be shrill and self-righteous, more even than usual, and they’ll never stop. It’s almost enough to make you want to vote for Obama, just so we won’t have to hear them.”

Tucker’s a card, but you can’t argue that a McCain win, for liberals, will be the political equivalent of Black Friday back in 1929.