Thursday, December 4, 2008

Peach State vote is the pits

The results are in and – thanks to Georgia voters – President-elect Barack Obama will not have a filibuster-proof majority to work with in the U.S. Senate. Incumbent archconservative Republican Sen. Saxby Chambliss won the Dec. 2 runoff election against Democratic challenger Jim Martin.

Chambliss won his reelection fair and square, and my beef is not with him. My question is for those voters who came out in droves on Election Day last month – to vote for Democrat Obama – and yet stayed home for the Senate runoff.

While Republican John McCain won the state of Georgia last month, he did so only by 5 percentage points – 52 to 47. And only 3 percentage points separated Chambliss and Martin in last month’s election (but neither garnered 50 percent of the vote, which was the reason for the runoff). In total, almost 4 million Georgians voted in last month’s election.

This week, however, was a different story. Only a little over 2 million Georgians voted, and Chambliss won by a whopping 14 points – 57 to 43. So what happened?

In the words of the New York Times, “Many of the Democrats who turned out last month in enthusiastic support of Barack Obama apparently did not show up at the polls on Tuesday.” The Times also quoted Merle Black of Emory University: “For a lot of African-American voters, the real election was last month. The importance of electing the first African-American president in history generated enormous enthusiasm. Everything else was anticlimactic.”

Too many voters just didn’t care issues and policies. They just voted for Obama because he’s black. If these voters cared about Obama getting legislation through the Senate, they would have turned out for Martin this week as they did for Obama.

But for these voters – many of them celebrated by the media for being first-time voters “energized” by Obama – issues and political action just don’t matter. What mattered was voting for a black man.

Not that any of this is surprising. Back when Obama won, there were too many people dancing in the streets, voicing extremely unreasonable expectations. I even heard people talking about how Obama would end the wars in both Iraq AND Afghanistan – oblivious to Obama’s comments that he wants to INCREASE the military’s presence in Afghanistan. They just weren’t paying attention to what Obama was saying, only what he looked like.

So the first opportunity these so-called energized, first-time voters had to cast a ballot after last month’s election, they sat on their hands. Without Obama on the ballot, they just didn’t care. So much for all that energy and enthusiasm.

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