It has been a very pleasant election morning. Two L'Oreal jobs are on hold waiting for client approval. Umbro is on hold pending new music choices and the transfer happening tomorrow. I am not sure what happened with Manny's Sergio Rossi ads, but they aren't happening right now either. All this absence of work has allowed me to take the boy to the playground on an unseasonably warm November day.
At the playground there were the usual coterie of Brooklyn transplant parents. Thai Nard, Argentine Mariana, Alabama April, the Frenchies from Zebulon and JJ,s kids. There was some excitement and apprehension, as our corner of the country probably has as many fervent foreign Obama supporters as supporters who can actually vote. The idea that Obama could lose is such a potentially devastating turn of events that the fear is nearly palpable.
I have been saying for a few months now that I don't see any way that McCain could possibly win. I am one hundred percent sure it will not happen. At least that is what I will say, and keep saying. I just don't see it.
Robinson and I listened to the Brian Lehrer through the radio. Trying to give equal time to the McCain supporters, he took only their phone-ins for a while. Not quite the litany of the absurd as I would have expected, mostly people saying that they were "staying strong" and "sticking to their guns" in the face of oppressive peer pressure to vote Obama. I can see that. Were someone to wear a McCain t-shirt with authentic intent around my group of friends, they would be pariah instantly. Of course, there is always the one goofy guy, the one with the thick Long Island accent, who calls in and swears that no Obama supporter he has ever talked to has one rational reason for voting for him other than because he is a black man, and that the whole thing is a farce. It got my hackles up, I'll admit.
We picked Marina up at yoga, deposited her at the school and she voted. Returning to the car, she was visibly buoyed. That sparkley eye thing in full effect. She has never seen so many young Puerto Rican and Black people at the polling station before. Usually it is all old people with the occasional white hipster trickling in to cast a ballot. But today it was packed with people from the neighborhood of all kinds.
As of 11:45, she was the 91st person in our precinct to vote. That confirms a couple of suspicions: one, I was the first person to cast a ballot in my precinct and two, not many people in our neighborhood vote. This is probably due to the massive Satmar Hasidic community, but may also be a mirror to the state of certain things.
Marina just read to me the David Brooks op-ed piece in today's Times. A very insightful bit of punditry & perspective.