Brief Thoughts - Smile, We Won!

The following is the text of an e-mail I sent to an old friend of mine on election night.  It has been slightly edited to (a) take out some personal stuff, and (b) make it more coherent than it was when I wrote it, at about 2:30 a.m. on 24 January:

Well, look:

It's a win. A win beats the holy hell out of a loss. A few months ago it was quite reasonable to assume, based on the opinion polls (not that we should listen to them …) that we'd lose this thing.

The way some people are carrying on, you'd think Paul Martin was just handed a majority.  On the one hand, that's a good thing: Conservatives (small- and big-"c") shouldn't necessarily be satisfied with the final results, in the sense that there is always room to improve, and always room to do better.  But once again, the (conservative) folks who are glum now should remember that  it is ok to celebrate your victories, even if (a) there's more work to do, and (b) the celebrations shouldn't go overboard.

The Tory win didn't go far enough - not many good things do - but it went further than it could have. The Libs won't be able to freeze us out of the cities forever; and if you think your ol'buddy Jason is being too optimistic on our ability to win in places like Toronto and Vancouver, I suggest we take a look at Quebec: nobody expected us to do that well when this thing started.

So chin up: at the end of the day, you and I can now say that we have, for the first time since reaching the age of majority (ed. note: I realize that doesn't mean much to most of you young whippersnappers on the internet these days, but for me, it's been a bit longer) have been a part of a winning campaign on the national level. And that aint bad.

- Jason.

More comments on the results, locally and nationally, are to follow.  For now, I have some work to catch up on.

More later.