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Obama

Obama, The Day After

By matt carter ⋅ November 5, 2008 ⋅  Email This Post ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

Sean Quinn of FiveThrityEight.com sums up what a lot of us are feeling today:

I’ll be honest, it’s a little hard to write today. I suspect a lot of you may be feeling the same complex set of emotions at the end of a political season so seismic that most of us will remember it as long as we live. We will tell our children and grandchildren what we saw and felt.

…

We suspect we’re not alone. Right now, organizers, full-time volunteers, campaign staff, and everyone else who gave single-minded effort toward November 4 are waking up and saying to themselves and each other, “what do I do with myself?” Their cars are messes, their rooms disaster zones, and they’ve been cut off from friends and family for God knows how long.

This was by far the longest and biggest election season in US history, and there is so much left to process. The elation that Democrats feel is mixed with the hangover of carrying so much emotional electricity in the body for so long. Its discharge is necessarily going to leave an exhaustion behind.

We feel it too. There will be moments in the coming days, randomly standing in line at the grocery store, driving down the street in contemplation, the sight of a door you knocked, catching a certain song, a glimpse of Chuck Todd, hearing someone tell a story… where these emotions will just come bursting through, the enormity of it all. Just think of how much effort went into this. How much sacrifice. How many things had to go right. How many people had to want it so badly, and how the masterpiece of a campaign structure that David Plouffe and cohorts engineered allowed all that effort to be channeled into the right places to maximize efficiency.

Tags: Obama, presidential election