A lo lejos...

I've been reading a lot of the blog Wabi Sabi Moments, an American citizen writing from abroad about the election--*AWESOME* blog.

It's made me reflect, though, on my experience of the 2000 election, when I was in Spain, and having to explain to people every day about the Electoral College and, later, what the HELL was going on in Florida...

... but this was before YouTube, and even Teh Interwebs were in their adolescent stages of development.

The day of the election, I took myself to a little Internet Cafe and tried to get on cnn.com to get any sort of information that wasn't from the International Herald Tribune. There were, apparently, so many hits on the site that it had slowed to a crawl and there was simply no getting on.

So I resorted to Radio Nacional de España and listened to what was happening the night of, which was the morning of the day after for me. I woke up at about 6 a.m., knowing that the polls had closed, and heard the official result... Bush had won with 271 electoral votes.

I don't remember, prior to my existence on that day, ever knowing that 270 votes were needed to win the presidency. But I won't ever forget it now.

Bush won, and we all know the rest of that story.

I sneaked over to my American friends' apartment across the patio and attempted to stick a little note in their reja with the news. At that moment J. came out and I handed him the paper that said "Bush won. 271 votes." He looked at me, his liberal Oregonian face semi-shell-shocked. Slowly put down the paper and said "What does this mean?" I just shook my head and shrugged.

And then the Florida thing happened and there was, for a minute, hope.

But honestly, the 2000 election, being as far away as I was, never fully registered with me. Only now, after 8 years of That Man do I realize how much was at stake.