Election: UK perspectives (1)

Leave it up to the British press to provide useful news reports. This Guardian article begins:

Ruthless campaign mastermind got the Republican vote out

Network of 300,000 volunteers built up over four years.

The Bush campaign's election victory marks a strategic triumph for one man's ruthless and iconoclastic approach to ground-level politics.

In the last days of the race, a smile rarely left the face of Karl Rove, the president's chief strategist, and now his upbeat mood has been justified.

Convinced that his candidate could have pulled off an easy win in 2000 if only more faithful Republicans had turned up at the polls, Mr Rove vowed to challenge the Democrats' traditional status as the party pre-eminent at getting out the vote.

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And this Guardian article characterizes the general depression and anxiety that fell over liberal Yanks and Brits alike. My favorite quote:

If there is such a thing as collective depression, then the circumstances of the election are just right to encourage it. At least the scandal in Florida four years ago gave people something to focus on; there was a battle to be raged. This time, despite some lingering uncertainty over the final result in Ohio, there isn't the consolation of injustice, of having someone to blame. Depression is not a very focused thing and yesterday's mood was universal only in that it allowed people to group their individual reasons for cheerlessness around the huge disappointment of the election result. Some of these reasons are seasonal: the clocks have gone back, the leaves are coming down, the bloody Christmas stock has appeared in the shops. Everywhere you look is raw material for misery and it's tempting to hang one's reluctance to get out of bed on a more profound psychological state than laziness. To this extent, "collective depression" is a misleading term; it has connotations of Jung and a mystical union between people. But even given all of this, there was a unified sense yesterday morning that the prospect of having Bush back in business made all the small, crap things in one's life worse.

"Ach," says Oliver James, the clinical psychologist. "I was too depressed to even speak this morning. I thought of my late mother, who read Mein Kampf when it came out in the 1930s and thought, 'Why doesn't anyone see where this is leading?'"