These days of course you couldn’t get me to v*te unless you stuck a gun in my ear. But that doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy the show. <\/p>\n
And I’ve always found it quite a show. Some of my fondest memories from childhood involve trying to keep my eyes open late-late at night as election returns trickled in. Sometimes when I couldn’t make it, Mom would wake me up around midnight to tell me who the new governor or president or senator would be.<\/p>\n
When the TV networks perfected the art of calling elections seconds after the polls closed, they ruined that. But the Internet has brought a little of the excitement back. Never mind that the “experts” called the New Hampshire primary for Romney hours ago. The v*tes are still being counted and an interactive AP\/Google map<\/a> is letting us watch, precinct by precinct, district by district.<\/p>\n With 75 percent of the v*tes counted, it’s just as the experts said — Romney 38 percent, Paul (bless his heart) just under 24 percent.<\/p>\n Did you ever think you’d see Ron Paul polling at 24 percent, beating the cr*p out of candidates anointed by the mainstream?<\/p>\n But the map tells an even more interesting story. Look at all those green spots. Those are the areas Ron Paul won. A lot<\/i> of green, snaking its way down the west side of the state. That’s encouraging.<\/p>\n I wait for results to come in from Keene, that bastion of Free Staters. (Nothing yet; the big suspense of the night.) (In the end, the big disappointment of the night.)<\/p>\n It’s true that most of those places Ron Paul took today are small ones. Take a look at Millsfield. Paul got 53.3 percent of the vote there. All eight votes worth. In his “big win” areas, he got so few votes — 125, 77, 133, 149, 164 — that it seems marvelously strange that such tiny totals are being reported to the entire globe. Still, in those polling places, he got way more than all those establishment hacks, more than New Englander Romney, the man the media has already crowned.<\/p>\n And we all know it’s true that none of this means anything. At least not in the big political picture. No doubt Candidate Standard-Brand R or Candidate Standard-Brand D will be elected president next November and things will keep rolling down the road to catastrophe.<\/p>\n But you look at those green lights shining out of the New Hampshire hinterlands … and doesn’t it give you at least a hint of hope? Doesn’t it tell you we’ve got more friends out there than we know? Doesn’t it confirm that “… Something’s happening here, but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?” That somewhere, in the backwoods and the small towns and the hearts and minds of Americans, a very healthy sort of independence is putting down deep roots?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" These days of course you couldn’t get me to v*te unless you stuck a gun in my ear. But that doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy the show. And I’ve always found it quite a show. Some of my fondest memories from childhood involve trying to keep my eyes open late-late at night as election returns trickled in. Sometimes when I couldn’t make it, Mom would wake me up around midnight to tell me who the new governor or president or senator would be. When the TV networks perfected the art of calling elections seconds after the polls closed, they ruined…<\/p>\n