Election Hash

Last week we feasted on the main course.  Reporters, commentators, and Facebook fiends flew at the election with forks and knives, not only stuck in the election, but often stuck in each other.  Reminded me of family dinners where if you left the table for just a second, your plate was removed and someone else took your place, loud, furious affairs that left scraps of this and that on the table.

Those pot roasts on Sunday left some mighty good hunks of beef, roasted potatoes, and carrots.  Monday suppers used those scraps to create hash, something similar to what the English call "bubble and squeak", such as the dish featured in this recipe.  Some recipes get pretty fancy with this poor man's supper, with hippie seasonings or New York styling.  Heck, even our dear friend Martha Stewart has a version of hash. 

So here is my version of election hash, a week after the main course, with only a bit of this and that, the nibblings that no one else could use.

I'm both happy and sad:  happy that the Republicans did so well, but sad that, once yet again, the Republican candidate in Virginia pulled up short, less than one percentage point away from winning.  And Ed Griffith was a good candidate, better than many other Republican candidates we've had recently.  It's tiresome having the large population centers in northern and Tidewater Virginia outvote the rest of the state.  Stop it, already.

Everyone was looking for an explanation of why the election turned out the way it did.  Here's mine:  more people did NOT like the way Barack Obama, Harry Reid, and Valerie Jarrett were handling things than did like the way things were going.  That's a difficult thing for Barack Obama, Harry Reid, and Valerie Jarrett to accept.  We don't like you. Although Obama's popularity rating is about one percent higher than George W. Bush's was in 2006 when the Democrats regained control of the House of Representatives.  

Much was made about the fact that the voter turnout was low.  Statisticians are still counting up how many people actually voted, but it's going to be close to 36.6%, which is where it now stands.   In discussing the turnout, the New York Times came up with this little derogatory statement:  ". . .northern states generally have higher turnout than southern states, as they did this year, because voting tends to correlate with education and income levels."  Well.  Really.  I guess I'm too stupid to vote because of where I live.  This election left the Times wondering why all those uneducated, poor people in the South went to vote.  They're angry and aggravated.  That's why. 

Mid-term elections, though, generally have lower voter turn out.  This election did see much lower turnout, but when the President says that the Democrats lost because two-thirds of the people didn't vote, he should also note that in mid-term elections in 2002, 2006, and 2010, nearly 60% of the people didn't vote.  Not that much difference. 

Another notation:  in Maine where the percentage of voters participating was a whopping 59.3%, the Republican won, and in Virginia where the turn out was 36.7%, a lower rate than in 2010, the Democrat won.  There goes Obama's theory.

So for now, we can resume our normal lives, whatever they may be.  For a short time though, my normal routine will be interrupted by a knowing slip of a smile.  We won this one.