Predictions

Election Night 2012 was far from the bloody Apocalypse we all feared, though no nearer to the elated and unhinged Fuckfest the best of us aspired for it to be.  In the executive race, the black guy edged out the very personification of evil with the political equivalent of securing a close victory with a last second pick-six.  In the upper chamber, one side couldn't entirely toe the Anti-Rape party line, so the Good Guys picked up a handful of cushiony seats in the world's most useless institution.  If you think a modest advantage in a body designed to protect slavery will make a difference, I hope you end up on the other side of my next automotive transaction.  As for the lower chamber, that sweatbox has been gerrymandered to a point of predictability that even Bruckheimer would find trite and offensive.

Which is all to say that it's exactly the same.  We'll have fewer commercials and some of my bookmarked websites will see fewer clicks, but the architecture remains.  The status quo preserved.  The same hands grasp the same levers.  And yet it was a monumental election.

Not in the sense of Abe or Franky, but something more akin to the election of Reagan or the end of Reconstruction.  It will be the end of one of those chapters at the end of the textbook that students will not see because History classes rarely even make it to WWII.  But it will be in there.  Last Tuesday was, officially, the end of the George W. Bush era, which was, ostensibly, the grossest and ultimate in the Ronald Reagan era.  A Black man ran for a second term with an 8% unemployment rate and a pledge to raise taxes while every single citizen had resigned themselves to the reality that the rest of their life will be worse than had it occurred a generation before.  And he won.  Not because Americans had some epiphany and saw that the Mormon would do the same shit that got us into this mess, only worse.  After all, stupid is as stupid does and it ain't no accident that movie was a sensation in this country.  He won the first term because he won the semifinal with Hillary that put him in the place to be where any Democrat would win.  He won this round on his own, even if a larger chunk than we'd care to admit pulled his lever with their noses plugged.

Which leaves us with the future.  Obama's second term?  He'll solidify Obamacare, which should be a huge hit for the coming generations.  He'll appoint one or two more female justices to help overturn Citizens United in the immediate future and serve as a sturdy firewall against numerous potential disasters in the long game.  He'll get the wealthy to pay higher taxes, likely win a battle on the defense budget, and oversee enough modest economic growth to retire as the President Who Got Us Out Of The Recession.  He'll be remembered as another Clinton or Eisenhower, maybe higher because he's Black.  On merit alone, he won't deserve Rushmore.

The sodomizing finance industry will largely stand when he's done.  Employment will continue to be tied to corporations and boards of directors.  Our infrastructure will see no injection of care.  New York and California will look a little brighter.  Detroit too.  Places without oil or any meaningful resource or economic sector will shrivel and become sources of strange violence and weird culture.  Some of the latter will be bad.

But I started talking about the Pivot, didn't I?  That comes in 2016, then really in 2020, when Democrats have a couple more wins under the belt because Republicans can't quite shake the Let's Be Total Cunts strategy.  They'll get close, but modest electoral gains in 2014 will reinforce their obstinance, when it's really owing to the backwash comprising the off-year electorate.  They'll keep Obama's greater ambitions in check, but will really be digging their own grave for 2016, when they lose the next Big One.  That President will be white and win by huge margins, and therefore have a mandate.  Their mandate will do Real Good, and they'll be rewarded by huge swaths in the off-year of 2018, then in their reelection in 2020.  And that's when new House districts will be drawn. 

The ensuing ten years will be an era of Progression such as we have ever known.  So long as the India-China Resource War doesn't kick off, drawing in alliances from several other simmering conflagrations further exacerbated by The Warming of the Planet, all of which is probably the safe bet, then Prosperity will ensue.  How's that for a good night's sleep?