So it’s to be four more years, is it? I can’t say I’m surprised. Disappointed, dejected, disgusted, and very worried about what comes next, but not surprised. The fact is, I’ve been steeling myself for the big let-down for weeks now. I started planning what I would say about it here on Simple Tricks, if it became necessary to say anything at all, back around the middle of October. (Obviously, I hoped it wouldn’t be necessary.) Except now it has become necessary to say something, and I find that most of what I had imagined myself saying no longer applies to how I’m actually feeling.

You see, even though I knew it was possible, if not likely, that Bush would win another term, I’m baffled by the way it actually happened. I am frankly amazed that Bush won a clear majority of both the electoral vote and the popular count. I figured an ’04 Bush victory would be a repeat of 2000, with Bush getting the electoral numbers he needed but facing a significant disparity when it came to people’s actual opinion of him. My theory was reinforced by his dismal popularity rating coming into November, and by the fact that many Republicans seem to be as fed up with the man as we Democrats. So when I read today that he actually garnered about 51% of the popular vote — a slight majority, I hasten to point out, but nevertheless a clear one — well, it just didn’t compute for me. Am I really so different from so many of my neighbors in the way I perceive reality, and in the things I consider to be important? So out of touch with how the rest of America thinks? I guess maybe I am…

I’ve never felt so alienated from my own country as I have today, never felt like such an oddball. Being a non-religious person in the middle of Mormon-dominated Utah is one thing; that’s a lifelong exercise in exclusion that I long ago learned to deal with. I’ve endured the sense that I don’t fit in anywhere in my home state by believing that there were lots of people outside of this state who were just like me, and that my feelings of being a mutant were largely a trick of geography. Today, however, I’ve been feeling like I don’t fit in anywhere in America.

Wil Wheaton perfectly captured my morning mood when he wrote, “Apparently, my country holds a fundamentally different set of values than I thought we did, and that scares the shit out of me.” Amen, Wil. The America I believe in would have condemned the Bush Administration purely on his job performance alone, if not his actual ideology, and my America wouldn’t be too keen on the ideology either.

So why the big disconnect between guys like me and Wil, and the rest of the “red staters?” I honestly don’t know. I’ve considered a lot of different possibilities — education, income level, religious affiliation, marital status, age, occupation — and I can’t come up with a single reason that doesn’t have so many exceptions that I have to discount it. It just seems to be a fact that a huge number of people see the world through a profoundly different lens than I do.

And that’s a pretty discouraging thought, for all kinds of reasons.

However, this thought was offset somewhat when I considered the other side of the popular vote equation. According to the news, Kerry earned 48% of the popular numbers, with the missing 1% presumably going to Nader or other third-party guys that nobody’s ever heard of. Just like the old “half-empty, half-full” cliche, you can see these numbers differently depending on how you look at them. Bush won a majority, yes, but 51% and 48% aren’t that far away from one another, and that missing 1% more likely than not doesn’t agree with Bush any more than the 48-ers do. That means that 49% of the country, just barely less than half, did not vote for Bush and presumbably feel the same way about him and his administration that I do, more or less. Forty-nine percent means that I’m not such a mutant after all.

Of course, that’s not what today’s spin-cycle would have you believe. The Republicans are going on about how those few percentage points represent three million people and how a Republican president has never before gotten so many votes. They’re trying to whip these high-school debate-class talking points into some kind of a mandate for President Bush and his policies. But the numbers don’t really mean what they’re trying to tell us they mean. The truth is that this country is still pretty evenly divided when it comes to President Bush and where he wants to lead us. This election is not the mass affirmation of the last four years that the right wants us to believe it is.

I hope that the president heeds this fact as he failed to do in his first term, that he realizes he still does not have a mandate from the majority of Americans and adjusts his policies accordingly. Even Reagan became more moderate in his second term.

But I don’t see that happening in a second Bush term, not with the Republicans gaining even more control over the House and Senate and at least one seat about to open up on the Supreme Court. I think we can expect the Republicans to become even more authoritarian and demanding than they have been in the four years just ended, more determined to utterly squelch any debate on their ideas. And the Democrats, in turn, will become more angry and more obstructionist, just as the Republicans themselves were angry and obstructionist ten years ago. Those who think that everyone is going to quiet down now that the election’s over are in for a surprise. I think we’ve got forms of ugliness coming down the pipe that will make Bush’s first term look like a summer afternoon by the lake. And that’s just the rhetoric we’re going to be hearing. In addition to the talk, he’s still got those niggling practical details to take care of: the economy, the environment, and that awkward little Iraq war of his.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe now that Bush has bested his father’s record and laid to rest all that “one-term Bush” baggage, the president will become more gracious and more willing to listen to opposing voices. But if I could sit down with Mr. Bush for five minutes, I would tell him just one thing: now that he has secured his place in history, history will be his judge. Our children and grandchildren will decide how he is to be remembered, not the Republican party, not Karl Rove, not the media. They will decide what kind of president he was based on what he leaves behind for them. And I would hope that Mr. Bush would ponder that and keep it in mind as he makes each and every one of his future decisions, starting with how he behaves in the light of his first clear, unambiguous victory.