You know how when someone runs for President and loses, and they crawl off into their hole, only to be heard from rarely?  I wish the entire party leadership would do that. Let me explain:

Here’s the list of the Presidential losers for the past three decades (not counting Carter and Bush 41):

Mitt Romney, John McCain, John Kerry, Al Gore, Bob Dole, Michael Dukakis, and Walter Mondale.

All of these guys crawled off and did not assume any kind of party leadership position.  Some did commercials, some made movies about fake climate problems, and some just faded into obscurity.

I wish the current party leadership would do that. I’m looking at you, Karl Rove.  I’m looking at all the people who are at the head of the Republican party.  They all need to go now, because they have failed.  Promoting two moderate Republican candidates (with token conservative VP candiates) two elections in a row and losing should tell them this strategy DOES. NOT. WORK.

On another note, I found this website tonight.  It shows you the vote tally (popular AND electoral) for every election from 1789 onward.  For instance, did you know Henry Clay ran for President three times (1824, 1832, and 1844)?  I thought it was interesting he didn’t run in consecutive elections (like Ross Perot), but he took time off.

I always thought that the Whig party was around from the beginning until the Civil war period when the Republican party started.  Nope. The Whig party didn’t come about until 1836, and only lasted until 1856. Twenty years.

I also found it interesting that the southern states almost always voted Democrat until 1960 when Barry Goldwater turned the entire southern bloc (from LA over to GA) red. With very few exceptions, these states have voted Republican ever since.

I think it’s interesting that today we KNOW that the entire left coast (CA, OR, and WA) is going to vote Democrat, and yet it wasn’t that long ago that it almost always voted Republican.  As a matter of fact, with only four exceptions and not counting the FDR years (when the entire country went Democrat), California was red from 1988 all the way back to 1860. But they’ve been blue since 1992.

This all makes me wonder what’s going to happen in the future. Will our country continue to get more and more blue?  Will something happen to change people’s minds? Who knows (short answer: God does)?

In other news, evidently Puerto Rico had a referendum yesterday where they expressed their preference to become the 51^st state.  So there’s that.