Now that Obama’s elected, apparently Obama supporters want to channel their passion to actually, well, make change. And preferably change a little more socially vital than volunteering at an animal shelter, like Obama’s latest campaign email suggested they do.

The LA Times reports:

Amid Obama’s transition to power, a spirited and often secretive debate has broken out among top campaign staff members over how to refashion the broad network of motivated volunteers into a force that can help Obama govern. …

Among the questions to be sorted out by Obama’s aides: who will lead the network, whether it will become part of the Democratic Party infrastructure, and whether it should focus on local service projects or more lofty national goals.

They may form a nonpartisan non-profit organization to include the Republicans and Independents who supported Obama’s campaign. Gawker, of course, treats the topic with its usual cynicism:

This is the problem with a huge fake-grassroots campaign based on the extraordinary qualities of an individual and not a cause or ideology! Unless Obama does decide to actually become a dictator or cult leader, it will be more or less impossible to harness the energy of all these millions of kids for any purpose, because none of them agree on what needs to be done beyond electing Obama, which they did.

They also note that the Onion has come true. (Scary. Very scary.)

Obama Win Causes Obsessive Supporters To Realize How Empty Their Lives Are

Democrats won’t get their 60-seat senate supermajority after all. Republican Sen. Saxby Chambliss of Georgia won re-election today in a runoff against Democrat Jim Martin. Now all that’s left to settle is the disputed senate race in Minnesota between Republican Norm Coleman and Democrat Al Franken, and then we can finally put the 2008 election to bed.

The percentage of people who donated amounts under $200 to Barack Obama’s campaign is generally equivalent to the campaigns run by George W. Bush, John McCain, and John Kerry, according to a newly released study by the Campaign Finance Institute. The New York Times reports:

The institute found that while nearly 50 percent of Mr. Obama’s donations came in individual contributions of $200 or less, in reality, only 26 percent of the money he collected through Aug. 31 during the primary and 24 percent of his money through Oct. 15 came from contributors whose total donations added up to $200 or less.

Obama raised record breaking amounts for the presidential campaign, and raised with that a reputation for a broad base of donors giving small amounts, which now looks to be something of a myth.

The Pew Forum tells us how the news media covered religion in the 2008 campaign.

• Religion stories accounted for 4% of the news coverage.
• 53% of the religion stories were about Obama. Palin got 19% of the religion-focused stories, and John McCain got only 9%.
• Biggest religion story—rumors that Obama is a Muslim (30%). Then Palin and her family life, Rick Warren and his Saddleback Forum, and abortion. Clergy (Jeremiah Wright, Michael Pfleger and John Hagee) took up 11% of the religion coverage. James Dobson took 5%.
• Culture war issues didn’t get a lot of attention. Social issues like abortion, gay marriage and stem cell research comprised 9% of religious-focused news and only 1% of all news coverage.

Read the entire report here.

Pollster John Zogby set fire to the blogosphere with his poll demonstrating that Obama voters had little idea who they were voting for.

See the results of the controversial poll.

Just 2 percent of voters who supported Barack Obama on Election Day obtained perfect or near-perfect scores on a post-election test which gauged their knowledge of statements and scandals associated with the presidential tickets during the campaign, a new Zogby International telephone poll shows.

The man who commissioned the poll, conservative commentator John Ziegler, asked for Zogby to do the same poll of McCain voters. Zogby declined, but told Politico he would do a poll of McCain voters with modifications.

I am happy to do a poll of both Obama voters and McCain voters, with questions that I formulated and sponsored either by an objective third party or by someone on the left, in tandem with a John Ziegler on the right — but poll questions that have my signature.

I believe there was value in the poll we did. I also believe it was not our finest hour. This slipped through the cracks. It came out critical only of Obama voters.

Ziegler said there’s no reason Zogby shouldn’t do the same poll. He told Politico:

The left-wing blogosphere basically demanded this.

Well, left-wingers? Right-wingers? Polls aficionados? Thoughts?

WARNING: This video is biased (what’s important, though, is that I’m letting you know that up front). It’s a series of interviews with twelve voters, answering multiple-choice questions about the two presidential and two vice-presidential candidates. The video is clearly trying to besmirch the Obama victory, but if you can get past that, it does say a lot about how ignorant many of us are when it comes to the candidates we support, no matter who they are.  Just a rude awakening that the enlightened American voter is rare. It’s long (nearly 10 minutes, so watch it on your lunch break). Notice what kind of trivial (and false) information they know about Palin, compared to more important facts they don’t know about some of the others. Weird. Not weird, but nuts.

The Wall Street Journal editors are tracking the recount in the Minnesota Senate race between incumbent Norm Coleman and Democrat challenger Al Franken, who trailed Coleman by 725 votes on Election Day. They think something fishy is going on.

Coleman’s lead has shrunk to 206 votes. Proportionally, the recount hasn’t resulted in the same gains for other Democrats in the state.

According to conservative statistician John Lott, Mr. Franken’s gains so far are 2.5 times the corrections made for Barack Obama in the state, and nearly three times the gains for Democrats across Minnesota Congressional races. Mr. Lott notes that Mr. Franken’s “new” votes equal more than all the changes for all the precincts in the entire state for the Presidential, Congressional and statehouse races combined (482 votes).

This entire process is being overseen by Democratic Secretary of State Mark Ritchie, who isn’t exactly a nonpartisan observer. One of Mr. Ritchie’s financial supporters during his 2006 run for office was a 527 group called the Secretary of State Project, which was co-founded by James Rucker, who came from MoveOn.org. The group says it is devoted to putting Democrats in jobs where they can “protect elections.”

WSJ doesn’t traditionally traffic in far-flung theories, so it might be time for some reporters to start digging deeper into this race that could tip the Senate even more Democrat. Before the election, Politico wrote about an administrative “Dem firewall” in closely contested states, where Democrat secretaries of state oversee election results, as is the case in Minnesota.

With a Democrat now in charge of the offices, which oversee and administer their state’s elections, the party is better positioned than in the previous elections to advance traditional Democratic interests —such as increasing voter registration and boosting turnout — rather than Republican priorities such as stamping out voter fraud.

Perhaps more important, in those five states Democrats are now in a more advantageous position when it comes to the interpretation and administration of election law…

Election officials don’t expect the contest to be resolved until mid-December, and Franken, who has a whopping 1,250 lawyers on the job, just filed a lawsuit today that adds a twist to the process.

John McCain gave his first post-election interview last night on Jay Leno. He was pretty light-hearted about the defeat, and cracked jokes like he is known to do.

Here’s part two, where he defends Sarah Palin:

Christopher Hitchens is earning his title as one of the few remaining public intellectuals, if for no other reason than his opinions, aside from those declaiming against theists, are coolly unguarded and beholden to no one. Which is to say, he never gets too excited about what he likes, nor too impassioned about what he dislikes (again, except his wholesale disregard for organized, or even unorganized, religion). But mostly he comes off like a cranky old professor who knows the chariot is pulled by passionate coursers and demands a reasonable charioteer to keep things healthy. Thus, despite his endorsement of Obama, his post-election essay in Slate is not all vaguely self-congratulatory, like the one written by Frank Rich. Hitchens is generally annoyed by the starry-eyed media right now.

Those who think that they have just voted to legalize Utopia (and I hardly exaggerate when I say this; have you been reading the moist and trusting comments of our commentariat?) are preparing for a disillusionment that I very much doubt they will blame on themselves. The national Treasury is an echoing, empty vault; our Russian and Iranian enemies are acting even more wolfishly even as they sense a repudiation of Bush-Cheney; the lines of jobless and evicted are going to lengthen, and I don’t think a diet of hope is going to cover it. Nor even a diet of audacity, though can you picture anything less audacious than the gray, safety-first figures who have so far been chosen by Obama to be on his team?

My favorite part is this:

There is an element of the “wannabe” about all this—something that suggests that, if the clock were to be rolled back, every living white person would now automatically stand with John Brown at Harper’s Ferry and with John Lewis at the Edmund Pettus Bridge. All the evidence we have is to the contrary: Abraham Lincoln ringingly denounced John Brown, and John F. Kennedy (he of the last young and pretty family to occupy the Executive Mansion) was embarrassed and annoyed by the March on Washington. In other words, there is something pain-free and self-congratulatory about the Obama surge. This has happened before, of course, with the high-sounding talk about the “New Frontier,” the “Great Society,” and “Morning in America.” It’s just that this time it’s more than usually not affordable. There are many causes of the subprime and derivative horror show that has destroyed our trust in the idea of credit, but one way of defining it would be to say that everybody was promised everything, and almost everybody fell for the populist bait.

And remember, Hitchens endorsed Obama. He’s just sickened by the messianic connotations, the ones that have yet to abate, of the man’s election.

Republican Sen. Norm Coleman’s once comfortable lead over Democratic challenger Al Franken has dwindled to just 206 votes as the state of Minnesota prepares for a recount next week. The shift was reportedly the result of election officials correcting typos–but in such a hotly contested race, some are skeptical and are voicing their concerns about potential fraud.

“There have been some concerning reports about strange things happening in the context of this recount,” Republican Gov. Tim Pawlenty said. He said it’s “important that the process be locked down and secure.”

It looks like things are going to stay interesting up in the North Star State.