It was a close election. Very close. But you’d never know that from the tone of the election post-mortem across the conservative and non-conservative (that doesn’t mean “liberal”) punditocracy. While talk of “mandates” with 51 percent of the electorate is absurd on its face, equally ludicrous–but no less frequent–is the blizzard of simplistic explanations for why three percent of the popular vote, and more to the point, 136,483 (actually less when one subtracts unexplained votes for Bush) in Ohio went to the Republican candidate. With such slim margins, the cold analytical mind would shudder at grand explanations, epiphanies, and electoral exaggerations. Such a mind would have to conclude that such a slim victory precludes grand conclusions. Thus the following from E.J.Dionne in the *Washington Post*:

These numbers do not lend themselves to a facile ideological analysis of what happened. The populist left can fairly ask why so many pro-government, anti-corporate voters backed Bush. The social liberals can ask why so many socially moderate and progressive voters stuck with the president. The centrist crowd can muse over the power of the terrorism issue. The exit polls found that perhaps 10 percent of Al Gore’s 2000 voters switched to Bush. Of these, more than eight in 10 thought the war in Iraq was part of the war on terrorism.

But such a deep appreciation for the complexity of the 2004 electorate seems not to have had any effect on Dionne’s conservative *Post* colleague, George F. Will, for Will has wasted no time in reveling in the “epiphanies” of last Tuesday. We won’t waste the reader’s time with an exhaustive catalogue of them (the first of them is that Bruce Springsteen does not select the President, electoral votes do). Among other epiphanies we find the following:

While 44 percent of Hispanics, America’s largest and fastest-growing minority, voted for Bush, African Americans continued to marginalize themselves, again voting nearly unanimously (88 percent) for the Democratic nominee. In coming years, while Hispanics are conducting a highly advantageous political auction for their support, African Americans evidently will continue being taken for granted by Democrats.

Keep in mind that this is an epiphany, so we are meant to be surprised by some important bit of electoral analysis. Only a conservative would be surprised, however, that minority groups do not constitute a monolithic entity. Perhaps there is some reason beyond their willful marginalization (having voted for the candidate who received the second highest number of votes in the history of the United States and the one who won 48 percent of the popular vote constitutes marginalization in Will’s mind by the way) that explains how 88 percent of the African American vote went to Kerry. Maybe–and perhaps this is a stab in the dark–a large number of them–88 percent in fact–rightly or wrongly *believed* Kerry to be the candidate who best represented their economic interests, vision of the Presidency, moral values, view in the war on terror, or whatever other of the sundry *reasons* one casts a vote for President. And in fact, when it comes to divining reasons for votes from the non-minorities, Will doesn’t hesitate to assume there is some reason, some reasonable reason, for their voting:

Newsom’s [mayor of San Francisco] heavily televised grandstanding — illegally issuing nearly 4,000 same-sex marriage licenses — underscored what many Americans find really insufferable. It is not so much same-sex marriage that enrages them: Most Americans oppose an anti-same-sex amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which is why it fell 49 votes short of the required two-thirds in the House and 19 short in the Senate. Rather, what provokes people is moral arrogance expressed in disdain for democratic due process.

On Will’s analysis, minorities get no special treatment. He doesn’t even wonder *why* they vote the way they do. That a certain group is reported to have voted en masse may certainly cry out for an explanation–just as the fact that all eleven proposals to ban same-sex marriages must be accounted for–but that explanation will perhaps best begin (and perhaps end) with one question: *why* did you (and 48 percent of the electorate) vote for the Democratic candidate?