The 2012 Election results . . . and what is Grover Norquist?

President Obama, as everyone must know by now, has won a second term as president of the United States. And the Democratic Party has gained seats in both the U.S Senate and the House of Representatives. I thought the election was completely resolved by last weekend, but I was wrong--I just discovered--because there are still some elections for which not all the ballots have yet been counted. Most shocking is the case of Arizona, where as many as one-fourth of all the ballots cast have not yet been counted, a full week after the election.

Also,  it is now well documented that in a certain number of states voters were forced to wait for many hours--as many as ten or eleven hours in some cases--to cast a vote. This may become a legislative issue, but whether or not legislation to enforce some sort of non-partisan, nationwide standards for the conduct of elections is enacted, there is no doubt that this has been an election cycle with a number of problems in the process.

It was mildly surprising to see some people proclaim that, first of all, the President's victory is not a mandate for his legislative agenda; and second, the President won because the Democratic Party suppressed voter turnout.

The first was surprising because, as Rachel Maddow noted last week, when George W. Bush won re-election with a more slender margin, he declared it gave him a mandate, and nobody seemed to complain about that.

The second was a bigger surprise, because if there was voter suppression in this election, the statistics would seem quite clearly to indicate that it was done by Republican governors in Ohio, Florida and Arizona, most egregiously.

But probably the strangest moment so far in the days since the election came today, when Grover Norquist, famous for telling conservative or Republican lawmakers to pledge that they will never, ever vote to raise income taxes, said that President Obama won in part because he, in Norquist's own words, "called Mitt Romney a poopie-head."

A poopie-head? Norquist,, to my mind, is something of an outlier, but a very influential one, because he has threatened candidates who violate his oat by saying their constituents will rebel against them by doing so. And I think his notion of "never" raising income taxes is simply unrealistic, besides being impractical and inimical to ecomomic growth. But having said what he said publicly about why the President won, Norquist has gone beyond being an outlier. His statement is simply bizarre, which is what makes me wonder not who he is, but  . . . what he is.

I'm open to theories.

There are many other interesting developments resultant from the election, including the fact that there are now more women in the Senate than have ever before served there at once, twenty altogether. n the coming days I hope to discuss some of the more interesting developments.