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FD: Found a good summary

News from the Votemaster Who maintains the Map on the LEFT SIDE of this BLOGG on his blogg....

10:00 A.M. EST Update. Start of the Roundup
What a night. Something for (almost) everyone. For Barack Obama and Joe Biden their long journey ends. Obama will go to the White House as the first black President in history and more the second coming of Jack Kennedy than the second coming of Jesse Jackson. Although Obama won't outsource running the country to him, Joe Biden will surely have a major role advising the new wet-behind-the-ears President. With two wars, an economy in shambles, crumbling infrastructure, and a raging culture war barely subsiding, the two of them will have their hands full. On the positive side, Obama got a real mandate. Assuming he wins North Carolina, where he currently leads by 12,000 votes, he will get at least 364 electoral votes, almost equaling the 379 EVs Bill Clinton got in 1996. His strategy of fighting in red states is also vindicated, as he took Virginia, the capital of the Confederacy, which hasn't voted for a Democrat since Lyndon Johnson in 1965, as well as the Bush states of Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, Iowa, Indiana, Ohio, Florida, probably North Carolina and possibly Missouri. He also gets expanded Democratic majorities in both the Senate and House. Of course, now he has to govern and you can't do that by asking a million people on the Internet each to submit one small idea. (Actually you can, but then you get a million small ideas and you still have to govern.
For John McCain it was an unmitigated loss. He gave a gracious concession speech and now has to face a tough reelection fight in Arizona in 2010, most likely against the most popular governor in the country, Janet Napolitano. Worse yet, his reputation is forever sullied due to the nasty campaign he ran. All he did for months was attack Obama: he's too young, he's too inexperienced, he's a socialist, he's a tax-and-spend liberal, he's this, he's that. Hardly a word from the McCain campaign about John McCain. He made many mistakes but the worst of all was hiring Steve Schmidt to de facto run the campaign. Schmidt is a small-bore tactician from the Atwater-Rove school of politics who believes if you win the news cycle every day you win the election. It was Schmidt who dreamed up the attack-before breakfast, attack-before-lunch, and attack-before dinner strategy. McCain has run for public office many times before and never has he run a campaign like this before. In the past, he basically said: "What you see is what you get." He ran as himself and was comfortable in his own skin. He was visibly uncomfortable this year being managed and having to attack all the time. It's not his nature. Remember, this is a man who crafted actual legislation with two of the most liberal members of the Senate, Russ Feingold (on campaign finance reform) and Ted Kennedy (on immigration).
Probably McCain's biggest single mistake, other than choosing Schmidt, was picking Sarah Palin as his running mate, although it is very likely that Schmidt forced him to do this to placate a restive base. Left to his own devices, McCain would probably have chosen his long-time friend Joe Lieberman or former Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge, who would have attracted votes in the center and put Pennsylvania in play. Palin was clearly out of her league. While she has about as much experience as Obama and is great at reading somebody else's speeches from the TelePrompTer, she was so woefully prepared for the job that the campaign hid her in plain view for two months. She gave two interviews, both disasters, and held no press conferences. If she were President and Putin, Chavez, Ahmadinejad or somebody else did something crazy, saying: "Oh my gosh, what a nasty man" and throwing up her hands just wouldn't cut it. She revved up the base as expected, but Rove's strategy of 50% plus one vote by turning out the base didn't work this time as the country really wanted change. In the end, she was a net liability as independents were repelled by her complete lack of gravitas, far right ideas and the gubernatorial ethics of Spiro Agnew. Being able to field dress a moose gets you only so far (and besides, don't moose normally go around naked?)
But Palin's race is not yet run. She proved to be a strong campaigner and drew big crowds. Her future is uncertain and to a large extent depends on what happens in the Alaska Senate race, which at this moment is still undecided. Despite being convicted on seven felony counts last week, Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK) leads Anchorage mayor Mark Begich by 3,000 votes in his Senate reection race with some votes still uncounted. If Stevens wins, there is an excellent chance the Democrats will move to expel him from the Senate. The Republicans will not want to appear to support a convicted criminal and will probably vote to expel him. If this happens, there will be a special election to fill the seat. Very likely, Sarah Palin will run and win as she is still popular in Alaska. Come 2012, she will have 2 years' experience as governor and four years' experience as a United States senator. She will be well positioned to run for the Republican nomination although she may have to contend with Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney, and others. But she will actually have to learn something about government in the next four years. You can't run for President while hiding from the press. Her model will be Ronald Reagan, another right-winger who ran (for the Republican nomination) in 1976 and lost (to Jerry Ford), but came back to win a whopping victory in 1980. But Reagan was governor of California for 8 years, arguably the second toughest executive job in the country.
As of this moment (10 A.M. EST), several races are still open including the North Carolina and Missouri presidential races, Senate seats in Alaska, Oregon, Minnesota, and Georgia, and House seats in AL-02, CA-04, NJ-03, and WA-08.
That's all for now. Time to get this posted. More later and certainly more tomorrow. Thanks for coming along for the ride.
4:00 EST Update. Historic Night
What a historic night in many ways. I'm going to bed for a while now. More later in the day. The site did extremely well. With three servers running lighttpd we were able to handle 300,000 visitors/hour and 2500 requests/sec at the peak. The total number of visitors yesterday was just over 3 million.
The Onion summarized the election as only it can with the headline: "Black Man Given Nation's Worst Job"