Odd Thought of the Night

If you're looking for sweeping statements about the impact of this election and what it means for the future of this country, you probably came to the wrong place - this is a libertarian blog, after all. All I'll say on that is that: 1. the clearly less-bad candidate won, which is about the best I could have hoped for; 2. there's no denying the symbolic importance of Obama's victory, and for that alone, I am extremely happy he prevailed over McCain. But if you want much more than that tonight, then I would suggest you go to one of the thousands of other blogs with deep reflections on what kind of "mandate" Obama now has, and what we can expect from him. I might go into that topic some other time, but tonight is not the time to look at that.

Instead, I just want to write about one thing that strikes me as deeply interesting and anomolous about this country. For all of our talk about the virtues of military service, in every election since 1980 (with the obvious exception of 1988), the Presidential candidate with the more extensive military record has lost. What this means, I'm not exactly sure, but it's pretty clear that being a war hero has long ceased to be a legitimate qualification for office.