ARE WE THERE YET?

The electoral college meets today to cast their votes for president. We all know what's going to happen, but in Ohio a number of groups — one calling itself "We Do Not Concede" — are still contesting the outcome. Democrats have even fallen in line behind a recount sponsored by the Libertarian and Green parties. How embarrassing. This, even though Bush won Ohio by at least 119,000 votes. Meanwhile, Kerry won Pennsylvania by almost the exact same margin, yet mysteriously there is no clamor for a recount there. I'm all for finding out exactly how the votes went down, but what's good for the Buckeye is good for the Keystone, right? (Meanwhile in the Evergreen State, it's starting to dawn on them that manual hand recounts aren't always the best.)

The plaintiffs in Ohio fear, or claim to fear, that the Republican party stole the election just as they surely did in 2000. Jesse Jackson has even taken to using his Chicago Sun-Times column as a platform from which to slander libel Ohio Attorney General Ken Blackwell, a conservative rising star in the Republican party, who just happens to be black. Jackson has nothing but a litany of imagined or irrelevant grievances that had gone stale weeks before Election Day (e.g. Diebold rigged all their machines). Don't forget that 16 percent of Ohio's African-Americans voted for Bush; that's not a lot in absolutes, but it's almost double the black vote Bush got in the state last time and well above the national average. Jackson is being dinosaured, and he knows it. (Speaking of PA, both it and Ohio could conceivably have black Republican governors in two year's time.)

Anyway, amid all this fuss about whether the GOP is stealing elections or not, I find it very amusing that one of the county Democratic chairmen in next door Indiana has — get this — just been arrested for vote fraud. If this was a Republican, you can be sure the chattering classes of Washington would be all over it. Liberal columnists would be raising their eyebrows and Chris Matthews would be lining up guests. Then again, that doesn't sound too different from what's been happening already.

P.S. — I should also mention this terrific USA Today article on race and the Bush White House. Bush is the first president to nominate a Hispanic to one of the top four Cabinet positions, and he is the first president to have women and minorities (and in Condi, both at once) among his closest advisers. Not that you've heard much about it, though:

One reason it has gotten little attention is because Bush himself rarely talks about it. At a convention of minority journalists in August, Bush declared, "If you look at my administration, it's diverse, and I'm proud of that." But he doesn't cite numbers. Bartlett and other Bush aides sounded surprised when told that Bush's record on diversity in top jobs matched that of Clinton, who was praised for expanding opportunities for women, blacks and Hispanics.

If Clinton was the first black president, then surely Bush is the second.

Update, 5:42 p.m. — I wrote the first draft of this almost 12 hours ago, in a pre-caffeinated state. The many, many grammatical errors have now been fixed. Even if you don't care, I do.