.orgins /

John McCain ran a mistake-prone and at times erratic campaign for the White House. He rolled the dice on the unknown and untested Sarah Palin as his running mate. He never articulated a clear message to voters about his candidacy.

But the emerging postmortem consensus of political experts is that the Arizona Republican really didn’t have a prayer of winning no matter what he did.

McCain was anchored to the historically unpopular outgoing GOP President Bush and faced a hostile electorate looking for a new direction. Add to that the worst financial crisis in generations and ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And his Democratic opponent, President-elect Barack Obama, is a true American political phenomenon, one of the most gifted orators of his time.

“Everything was going to go the wrong way for the Republicans, in general, because of the negatives that President Bush had. When you combine the war, the economy, the gas prices - it’s a hell of a thing,” said Alberto Gutier, a longtime Phoenix Republican activist and diehard McCain supporter.

Obama defeated McCain on Tuesday in an Electoral College landslide. Obama won 52 percent of the popular vote to McCain’s 46 percent.

“Look, he didn’t run the best campaign that we’ve ever seen, but no Republican could have won this year,” said Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia. “You can’t win with conditions this bad for the incumbent party. And that’s McCain’s consolation: He did reasonably well under extremely difficult conditions. It was never meant to be.”

If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible; who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time; who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.

It’s the answer told by lines that stretched around schools and churches in numbers this nation has never seen; by people who waited three hours and four hours, many for the very first time in their lives, because they believed that this time must be different; that their voice could be that difference.

It’s the answer spoken by young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Latino, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled — Americans who sent a message to the world that we have never been a collection of Red States and Blue States: we are, and always will be, the United States of America.

It’s the answer that led those who have been told for so long by so many to be cynical, and fearful, and doubtful of what we can achieve to put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day.

It’s been a long time coming, but tonight, because of what we did on this day, in this election, at this defining moment, change has come to America.

(more…)

Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.

Why do we use it?

It is a long established fact that a reader will be distracted by the readable content of a page when looking at its layout. The point of using Lorem Ipsum is that it has a more-or-less normal distribution of letters, as opposed to using ‘Content here, content here’, making it look like readable English. Many desktop publishing packages and web page editors now use Lorem Ipsum as their default model text, and a search for ‘lorem ipsum’ will uncover many web sites still in their infancy. Various versions have evolved over the years, sometimes by accident, sometimes on purpose (injected humour and the like). (more…)