Wednesday, November 7, 2012

That wasn't so bad

The 2012 U.S. presidential election is FINALLY over, and Barack Obama won in a relative snoozefest. No big surprises, unless you count the repudiation of all the anti-intellectual (and, really, counterfactual) backlash that sprung up against election data analysts like Nate Silver.

And then there's Florida. Oh, Florida, how you yearn to be at the center of electoral controversy. In my very first wet-behind-the-ears job out of college, I was an editor at the St. Petersburg Times. The year was 2000. The election was... complicated. Let's just say spending months trying to reframe the issue of "no one has any idea what is going on in Florida" in a story every day was taxing.

This year, of course, the sun is about to come up in Miami the day after the election and no one has figured which candidate carried the state. That came after days' worth of complaints about inaccessible polling sites and ridiculous lines for early voting. That's right, even when the election's outcome is not in doubt, Florida insists on being in the spotlight. What, LeBron James and Disney World aren't enough attention? Sheesh.

But like I said, aside from that this seemed to be a relatively painless deal. The same cannot be said, however, for what remains the best way of interpreting modern politics: the violent video game.




Let's do it again in 2016!