Let’s think back to the primaries and recall how historic they were turning out to be. Democratic front runners Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were neck and neck in the primaries. Though it wasn’t clear who would take the nomination, we knew that we were in for an historic campaign either way.
Obama would of course overtake Clinton and became the first black Democratic presidential candidate, and by August we knew it was either McCain-Palin or Obama-Biden that would triumph. Perhaps there was a sense of relief, too, in what those two tickets had in common: neither had a Bush or a Clinton anywhere in sight.
Ever wish you could travel back in time to see how our presidential and vice-presidential candidates were represented online—before they became household names? Well, thanks to Google, your wish has come true.
In celebration of its tenth year, the quintessential search engine now allows users to surf the Web like it’s January 2001. Plug in the individual names and you get the results circa 01/01. If this were golf, guess who’d be the big winner in terms of hits? Give up? It’s Sarah Palin.
The results of the 2004 presidential election gave us, among other things, a potentially reverse-engineered acronym.
PEST, or post-election selection trauma, refers to an overwhelming dissatisfaction with and denial of election results that causes some to seek therapy. In 2004, the vitriol with which some regarded the re-election of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney had become unmanageably consuming. That’s the rumor, at least. An Internet search for the condition yields conflicting results. Among the legitimate-looking news reports of therapists seeing patients are sources that point to PEST’s dubious origins.
Let’s think back to the primaries and recall how historic they were turning out to be. Democratic front runners Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were neck and neck in the primaries. Though it wasn’t clear who would take the nomination, we knew that we were in for an historic campaign either way.
