Matt Ortega

(Hat tip: Jed Lewison, The Jed Report)

President-elect Barack Obama picked up another electoral vote just days after ascending to the presidency against Republican John McCain. Omaha World-Herald reports:

The Democratic presidential candidate claimed an electoral vote in the Omaha-based 2nd Congressional District — the first time in more than four decades a Democrat won any of Nebraska’s electoral votes.

The Omaha World-Herald is calling the race after Obama won 8,434 out of 15,039 early votes that arrived too late to be included in Tuesday’s results. They were counted today by Douglas County election officials.

Those ballots give Obama a 1,260-vote lead over Republican John McCain in the 2nd District.

The electoral vote brings the total to Obama 365, McCain 163 — a stunning difference of 201 electoral votes.

Conservatives are licking their wounds from the landslide defeat of Senator John McCain (R-Arizona) on Tuesday night and launched an online effort to showcase their stale policies and bankrupt political ideology.

2008 made one thing clear: if allowed to go unchecked, the Democrats’ structural advantages, including their use of the Internet, their more than 2-to-1 advantage with young voters, their discovery of a better grassroots model — will be as big a threat to the future of the GOP as the toxic political environment we have faced the last few years.

Just one thing: that “toxic political environment” they describe was created by the flawed policies that were stridently repudiated on Tuesday night. The growing consensus among conservatives appears to be simple: throw George W. Bush under the bus but make no major changes to their far-right platform that is dangerously out of the mainstream. Just talk about it differently.

We must be conservative in philosophy — but bold in our approach. We don’t need a slight tweak here or there. We need transformation. We can’t keep fighting a 21st century war with 20th century weapons.

But keep the 19th century political philosophy… right.

Conservatives are attempting to recreate the Party struggles liberals and progressives engaged following the re-election of George W. Bush four years ago.

Change is never easy, but as in the post-2000 period, it begins with tough love and a focus on what must be done at the local level. [...]

Just as Republicans must trust individuals and families with their own money, we must trust the volunteers who walk into our headquarters and train them to take responsibility for entire neighborhoods. We must trust the online grassroots who want to take action on our behalf, and who need a decentralized, peer-to-peer volunteer community supported by our campaigns to really be successful. That will require giving up some control — more control than our traditional institutions are used to giving up — in exchange for an exponentially larger and more effective volunteer/donor/activist ecosystem.

Yeah, but I liked it better when that vision was articulated by Governor Howard Dean several years ago. Dean proved that earlier this week when the 50-State Strategy was vindicated by President-elect Barack Obama’s massive electoral victory and 7 million vote margin.

Come to think of it, the “plan” is just recycled demands from progressive activists. 435-district strategy? 40 under 40 initiative? Again with the stealing of the ideas. It reminds me of a line from then-Senator John F. Kennedy’s acceptance speech at the 1960 Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles:

The Republican nominee, of course, is a young man. But his approach is as old as McKinley. His party is the party of the past, the party of memory. His speeches are generalities from Poor Richard’s Almanac. Their platform — Their platform, made up of old, left-over Democratic planks, has the courage of our old convictions. Their pledge is to the status quo; and today there is no status quo.

The incongruence of conservative rhetoric about “freedom” versus their actual platform is a profile in Orwellian thought.

And yet Democrats have been allowed to get away with the notion that their success online is fueled by a “bottom-up” culture while Republicans are “top-down.” Ironic — given that Democrats want top-down government control of your life, while Republicans believe in dynamic markets and a strong civil society.

See that? Democrats want to control your life! All that Republicans want to do is tell you who you can marry, force women to carry a pregnancy to term — even in cases of rape and incest, kill criminals of any age and any mental capacity with impugnity, and demand your total acquiescence and forfeiture of liberties in the name of Republican wars.

Now that’s freedom.

Paul Krugman in top form yesterday:

November 5, 2008,  6:45 pm

Zell Miller was right — sort of

Right slogan

Wrong party

Nate Silver and company at FiveThirtyEight.com were wicked accurate last night.