British magazine Five Dials asked eleven writers to “remember” their experiences on November 5, 2008, the day after Election Day. Of the eleven, three select McCain as the fictional winner. Two imagine the president-elect as promptly dying, but Suketu Mehta, author of autobiography Maximum City posits a world where Obama and Palin both go rogue – for each other:

He told her he wanted to have a private talk, to tell her that her attacks on him were getting increasingly hysterical and dangerous. The man arrested with the rifle at his last rally had said he had ‘been riled up’ by her speeches. He was going to ask her to cool it down, just a little. So they went up alone, in the still of the night, to her suite in the Sheraton on the square.

Who knows what happened there? Was it just loneliness, the brutal months on the trail, or just intelligent desire? They’re not doing any explaining, and it doesn’t matter anyway. When he told his wife the next day, the first thing she said was, ‘I’m no Hilary.’ The cuckolded husband, on the other hand, didn’t bat an eyelid. He was used to it. ‘You’ll come back,’ he predicted.

Lydia Millet has written politically-tinged comedy (George Bush: Dark Prince of Love) and speculative fiction (Oh Pure and Radiant Heart, where three Manhattan Project physicists are transported to modern America to survey their work). She envisions Obama eking out a victory, and how the Republican ticket handles the news:

John McCain, after delivering a cheerful concession speech that confused supporters and opponents alike with its puzzling allusions to ‘victory over the yellow man’, is taking a well-deserved rest in one of his eight homes in Sedona, Arizona while Sarah Palin, who plans to resign the governorship in favour of work in the private sector, is busy signing sponsorship deals with a number of corporations, including a hockey faceguard manufacturer based in Duluth and the trendy Japanese maker of her wire-rimmed glasses.

Playwright and memoirist Said Sayrafiezadeh, whose parents were members of the Socialist Workers Party, writes a fantasy that has neither major party candidate as victor. Instead, the people elect Roger Calero, the SWP candidate:

The Church of St Paul the Apostle was overflowing as usual and it was early evening before my wife and I could get inside. The carrot soup had a slightly metallic taste and the bread was stale and the stench of body odor was oppressive, but it didn’t matter. There was lots of excited talk at our table about how Calero had declared he was going to end the use of currency within three days of his inauguration. Within three weeks all factories and farms would revert to complete worker control. Were these just campaign promises? someone at the table asked. No, people responded vigorously, Róger Calero was a different kind of politician, he was a worker – a meat packer – and his interests were working-class interests. Everyone had a good laugh about the way McCain and Obama had tried desperately to salvage their campaigns by claiming that they too were socialists. ‘I’ve always hated capitalism and imperialism just as much as you have, my friends,’ someone said, mimicking McCain’s much-derided statement. A few of the lawyers got into a lively debate over how quickly Bernanke and Paulson would be brought to trial and whether they should be imprisoned for life or used to build roads and schools. And then everyone voiced their enthusiasm that Bush should also be tried if he could be extradited from the Cayman Islands.

But some writers suspect nothing ever changes, as with Hot Animal Love scribe Scott Bradfield, whose entire entry reads:

Of course I remember – who doesn’t?

Personally, I blame Nader.

The full entries are available in the latest issue of Five Dials.

Image from spudlyspudly.

[via The Guardian]

Well, sort of. Our hopes for an appropriately Voltron-esque democratic showdown were raised by a story in yesterday's New York Times about the problems that McCain supporters are having getting college students interested across the country, which contained this fascinating snippet:

The University of Florida in Gainesville is home to one of the country’s largest McCain student groups, with more than 1,000 members. Some of its volunteers stand for nine hours a day in a central campus plaza, pitching to students and selling T-shirts, their only source of campaign money.

The Obama group on campus, though, has hired a shuttle bus to drive Obama-supporting students to an early voting site 20 minutes away.

“Obviously, we don’t have the resources for that kind of thing,” said Joshua Simmons, 20, the chairman of Gators for McCain. “Right now, we’re just making sure that students know that this organization does exist, and that there are students out there who support McCain.”

As if to punctuate his point, Mr. Simmons was stopped midsentence while walking through campus recently and talking on his cellphone.

“What is that, a robot?” he said, exhaling noisily. “The Obama campaign has a robot set up in the plaza. It’s holding a sign that says ‘Powered by hope.’ Which I don’t think is entirely accurate.”

An actual Obama-supporting robot? Powered by hope? Our hopes were raised by the possibilities... and then dashed by the reality:
As Politico's Ben Smith complained, the robot "isn't quite as tricked out as one might have hoped." That's definitely one way of putting it - and yet more proof of being misled by lies and distortions of unscrupulous politicians (Insert your own political bias here).

The robot gap, cont'd [Politico]

The Obama campaign’s “McCain Wins” ad appeals to its base by not just speculating on what could happen if McCain wins, but by confronting them with the election night moment:

The Obama ad hopes actually seeing a McCain victory will have an emotional resonance, spurring people into action if they get a gnarly tingle down their spine. And MoveOn borrows the moment to remind young liberals to vote, further postulating a world where Obama supporters are more furious at non-voters than people who vote for McCain:

The most thorough work of speculative election fiction comes from James Dobson of Focus on Family. Dobson composed a 15-page “Letter from 2012,” illustrating a world after four years of an Obama presidency. Trying to sway young evangelicals who might be caught up in Obama’s rockstar appeal, Dobson paints the Obama dystopia as one where not just health care and defense policy are screwed up, but civil liberties are under attack:

Home schooling: “The land of the free”? Parents’ freedom to teach their children has been severely restricted. The Supreme Court, to the delight of the National Education Association, followed the legal reasoning of a February 28, 2008 ruling in Re: Rachel L by the Second District Court of Appeal in California (although that ruling had been later reversed). The Court declared that home schooling was an illegal violation of state educational requirements except in cases where the parents (a) had an education certificate from an accredited state program, (b) agreed to use state-approved textbooks in all courses, and (c) agreed not to not to teach their children that homosexual conduct is wrong, or that Jesus is the only way to God, since these ideas have been found to hinder students’ social adjustment and acceptance of other lifestyles and beliefs, and to run counter to the state’s interest in educating its children to be good citizens.

Granted both sides tend to paint their opponents’ presidencies in an extreme light, but perhaps if political candidates spent more time outlining their own visions for the future and less time doing battle, we’d end up with fewer undecideds.

The beauty part of the chart below is that if you go to C-SPAN's website it lays out each debate like this, and you can easily mouse through it and click through quickly to videos and transcripts backing up the chart's claims. I'm telling you, this is pure information crack.

Keywords in the Debate and Timeline [via Information Aesthetics]

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