And the Winners Is...

Pardon the George W. Bushism of the title...

Where there are losers there are inevitably winners.  So here's how I see the winners of Election 2010...

WINNER #1a:  Grass Roots
Not to be confused with 1960's-70's pop group The Grass Roots, although they did have a string of hits including, "Midnight Confessions", "Let's Live For Today", and "Sooner or Later".  Led by vocalist Rob Grill, the Grass Roots were one of many successful recording acts to form in San Francisco in the mid-1960's.

But I digress.

What I really mean is grass roots political organizing.  For the second election in a row, we've seen what motivated people fueled by money can do.  In 2008 it was Obama for America.  In 2010 there are several examples, including the Tea Party.  This very loosely affiliated group was simply making alot of (negative) noise one year ago.  Then, the BIG MONEY started flowing their way and suddenly they were a political force to be reckoned with.  Here in Iowa, another example was the Bob VanderPlaats-led effort to fire three Iowa Supreme Court justices.  An impassioned conservative Christian base and $650,000 was all it took to get rid of the "activist Liberal judges" who had the audacity to say that gay Iowans had the same right to marry as other Iowans.

But Grass Roots cannot succeed (and would not have in 2010) without it's doppleganger...

WINNER #1b:  BIG MONEY
I think it will be a very long time before the real story of BIG MONEY and its influence on the 2010 elections will be told.  Let's just say that if people are truly concerned about our freedoms being taken away by big government, just wait until they see what big corporations can do!

WINNER #2:  Nostalgia
Close you eyes for a moment (not until after you've read this, of course, cause if you close them now you won't know what I'm talking about) and think back to a car you drove when you were a teenager, or maybe during early adulthood.  I'll play along with you.  I'm thinking of the first car I ever purchased...a 1980 Dodge Colt.  Now as you think about that car, don't you find your face breaking into a little smile?  "That was the best damn car I ever had", you might think to yourself.  "Man, I miss that car.  Wish I had that today!"

Now open your eyes and remember again.  Yeah, not so pretty a picture, huh?  What I didn't think of the first time was that I had to run speaker wires to a toggle switch on the dash so I could turn the electric radiator fan on or off because it wouldn't turn itself off.  Or the fact that it was a rolling death trap that I happened to never get trapped in.

You could do the same exercise with an old girlfriend or boyfriend, or about the house you grew up in, and it's only human nature that you will remember the good things and forget the bad.  Ladies and gentlemen, that's called nostalgia.  Ladies and gentlemen, Governor-Elect Terry Branstad.

When Branstad was first elected Governor, I was a snot-nosed 18 year old voting in my first election.  Now I'm a middle-aged man, 50 pounds heavier, with graying hair and constant body aches.  And yet, for some reason, I find myself staring at the same face for Governor.

Now THAT'S change we can believe in?  Really?  Yep, for Iowans, the good old days were the 1980's and 90's.

Example #2:  Americans are nostalgic for the good ole days of Republican rule (OK, not that "ole"...but in the accelerated timeline of our attention-deficit society, it seems like a long time).  I apparently lived in a different dimension of time and space during the first decade of the millenium, because what I remember is that a lot of things went horribly wrong, and no one cared enough to try to fix them.  When someone came along who wanted to at least try to fix them, we gave him a year to undo the previous 8, and when he only accomplished 3/4 of what he said he would, we decided to move in a different direction.

Which leads me to the next winner...

WINNER #3:  Short Attention Spans
This election is the equivalent of America getting up from their recliner, going into the kitchen, and then forgetting what they got up and went to the kitchen for.

Really?  Did we really go from "Fired up, ready to go" to "Take Back Our Country" in 24 short months?

I think as a nation we are just plain sick.  The cause of our sickness is a virus...one every bit as dangerous as the swine flu (I mean H1N1...sorry pork producers...GO BACON!).  But this is one pandemic that actually DID come to fruition.  It's not a wiggly-squiggly little microorganism (not sure if a virus is a microorganism, but cut me some slack on this one) like the one that causes people to sneeze and drink NyQuil to get a good night's sleep.  And it's not spread by coughing into your hands and then giving your co-worker a high-five.  It's spread by television transmitters, cable TV modulators, and packets of data.  The virus is the modern media.

Oh, it almost hurts to say that, having spent a previous life as a news reporter.  But it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see the correlation between the spreading omnipresence of information and the reactionary psyche of the American public.

No, biased media is not an invention of the modern age.  Read a few online articles about "yellow journalism" and you'll see that the media has been sensationalizing and/or creating news for over a century.  What's changed is that 100 years ago, only a very small percentage of people had access to William Randolf Hearst's rags.  Today the extremist garbage on both sides of the political spectrum can be accessed by almost anyone online or on one of seemingly dozens of cable channels.  So the environmental volume has been increased so much, we're all going deaf.

I strongly believe that with such a short attention span, this country now lacks the ability to solve the tough problems we face because it will be impossible to find consensus on the solutions due to the ringing in our ears from the din of extremist media.

WINNER #4:  Republicans
Duh.
HOWEVER...is the Republican Party that won this year the same Grand Old Party that preceded 2008?  I'm not sure.

WINNER #5:  Democrats
Huh?

I'm not on crack.  Think about it...18 months ago President Obama was riding high with 70% approval ratings and the Republican party was in shambles.  Today, it's the opposite.

Because of WINNER #3, it could all turn the other way just as quickly.

Because if Americans voted for Obama in 2008 because they wanted change, and then voted against him in 2010 because they changed their mind about change, what's to say the USA (United States of Amnesia) won't change their mind about changing their mind about wanting change?

I'm afraid that in our new reality we're in for this kind of whiplash every election cycle.  We'll all need mental neck braces to deal with it.

OK, enough rambling.  I think I've got it out of my system...for now