Election night

• 8:20 p.m. -- We're at 40% reporting, and Hillary's ahead by three points. I'm a little hot under the collar, but her margin is slipping with every batch of new results they get in.
• McCain's victory speech -- I disagree with him on a lot of issues, but I cannot bring myself to doubt his intentions. He's not a great speaker: he read far too much of his speech, and the pundits on MSNBC are currently slamming it. But I do believe that the reason he's running for president is because he wants America to be a better place. I know some people are going to yell at me for not being liberal enough here, but I can't bring myself do dislike him personally. As Josh Marshall paraphrases his speech, ""I came to you not as a dickhead like Mitt Romney but to tell you the truth ..."
• Romney's concession -- MSNBC is currently raving about his speech, but I don't trust the fact that he said, right at the beginning of his speech, that he was going to ditch his notes and "talk from the heart." It sounded to me like he was playing to counteract the over-rehearsed reputation he has.
• 8:40 -- Some guy is talking now about how people are being sympathetic to Clinton because she got ganged up on at the debate and people think that they should just back off. If that is indeed the case, it's bullshit. If she's president, no one's going to back off. It all comes onto her, and she needs to be up to it.
• 8:43 -- Scarborough keeps saying Obama's only been in Washington for two years. 2005, 2006, 2007. By the time of the election, 2008. Learn to count, Joe. Furthermore, as Wyl just pointed out to me, Rudy Giuliani has never done anything as an elected official in Washington.
• 10:07, Hillary's victory speech -- she just mentioned college opportunities and student loan issues, and the crowd flipped the hell out. I had a hard time believing that all of the independent voters pulling the democratic ballots in unpredicted numbers were going for her, but there it is.
  

What it boils down to is that I was way off on this. I doubled McCain's margin over Romney, and I was close to 20 points off on Obama and Hillary. Giuliani did not lose to Ron Paul (though he didn't keep him out by much). Where the campaign goes from now, I don't know. I'm going to have to give it some deep thought tomorrow. As I see it, it's a horse race through Super Tuesday, and Obama's going to have to work real hard to come out on top.

Best situation for Obama: going into Nevada, neighboring-state governor Bill Richardson jumps and overtakes Edwards. Edwards, showing dismally, dumps all of his money on South Carolina but still loses significantly to Obama. Being broke and out of any sort of momentum, he drops out and throws his support behind the other "change candidate," Obama, just before Super Tuesday.

Crap.

Note: I started a long post a long time ago (during the Norman Hsu debacle) about why I don't want Hillary to get the nomination. I may revive it, so you know why.