It's a question Romney and Ryan both were deeply cogitating by the end of the day. The short answer, that more Obama people voted, is not as simplistic as it seems. If they didn't come from anywhere else, Obama's votes had to come from Democrats. This leads, unavoidably, to the conclusion there must be more Democratic than Republican voters in this country. That is something Romney didn't count on, and it's why he and his camp misread all the polls, and it's why they were so surprised on Election Night. How surprised really? They had bought fireworks.

This is not a way the Romney camp thought their candidate could lose. The Romney people had no strategy for taking Democrats' votes away from Obama.

The notion of Democratic numerical superiority remains incomprehensible to many Republicans. They point to polls where more people consider themselves conservative than liberal. And they conclude there are more of their kind now. Wrong time to fall in love with a poll. Who knows what people really think they are saying?

What they're not saying is how they registered. Seventeen percent of self-identified conservatives voted for Obama in this election according to exit polls. Most party affiliation polls give Democrats a numerical edge among registered voters of between 3% and 7%. The outlier is Rasmussen, the only pollster who puts Republicans in the majority.(See chart.)

Romney scored about a 2 million vote advantage among Independents, and gained 1 million more from the crossover vote. Obama overcame that deficit with 6 million more Democrats' votes than Romney got from Republicans. And that, as they say, was that. A three million margin of victory. Small, but decisive.

Rush Limbaugh said repeatedly that anti-Obama enthusiasm among Republicans would get their ranks to the polls in bigger numbers than Democrats on Election Day. He was sure they had the enthusiasm. But there just weren't enough of them.

So, was it Obama's highly sophisticated, detailed and database-driven voter targeting and get-out-the-vote effort that turned the tide for the President? Was Limbaugh, after all, wrong about Republican enthusiasm?

Don't be too sure. The Obama people get high marks even from Republicans for their ground game. And they did accomplish great things in the battleground states. But nationally, people weren't as excited about this election as they were in 2008. Almost 7 million fewer voted. Romney got half a million fewer votes than McCain did. And Obama's turnout machine was a whopping 7.5 million votes short of its 2008 effort.

Turnout estimates depend on how many Republicans and Democrats respectively you think there are. Opinions differ. And strange as it might seem, it's hard to get a firm handle on the number of registered voters in this country. A number of states don't even record party affiliation when they register voters. Several states are even now still counting their votes.

But there's evidence that overall the Romney campaign did as good a job of getting their vote out as the Democrats did and in some cases a better one. (Republicans generally deliver higher turnout rates, which is why The Washington Post reported that when pollsters tallied registered as opposed to likely voters, Obama would win handily.

The thing with exit polling is that people are like politicians. Instead of telling you the truth, they're as likely to tell you what they think you want to hear. Or even worse, they'll tell you what they think they'd like to hear themselves say. So the Romney people may not even believe in exit polls.

In fact, it's surprising the Republican party is regarded as the party of faith. There are so many things they don't believe in.

They don't believe the employment reports. They don't believe in evolution, they don't believe in climate change, they don't believe in women's reproductive rights, they don't believe in minority voting. They don't believe the President is a Christian, they don't believe he's not a Socialist and some don't think he's even an American.

And they didn't believe the poll numbers. They kept insisting the pollsters were oversampling likely Democratic voters. There couldn't be that many of them. It was an apostasy that would prove fatal.

There are a fair number of Republican apologists offering any range of reasons for the outcome, including Romney himself, but none of their explanations seems to encompass the plain fact that they simply were outgunned. These "numbers" guys needed to learn to count better.

Of course, there was Obama's summer onslaught of negative advertising. The Obama camp smartly began blasting Romney with a blitz of negative ads, particularly in battleground states, as soon as it was clear he was getting the nomination. They tried to define Romney to the general electorate before he could do so himself. He was still recovering from a bruising primary season and lacked ad money to fight back. Campaign finance laws segregate primary and general election spending.

The ad blitz was nicely complemented by a series of self-inflicted wounds on the campaign trail as well as friendly fire from well-meaning but hapless Republican congressional candidates, some of whose gaffs most likely cost Republicans the Senate again, This all kept Romney in a bad public light, and down in the polls, all the way to the first debate, where Obama graciously ceded back the advantage.

Nor did Romney get as big a boost from SuperPAC money as expected. The Republicans did spend more combined advertising dollars than Obama, TV advertising eats up 75% of the money candidates raise. But because Obama's TV money was mostly raised within his campaign organization, he got preferential advertising rates while the Romney PACs had to pay top dollar. In the end, Obama actually ran more total ads than Romney and his supporters.

But you can forget SuperPAC money and ad blitzes, along with ground games,base enthusiasm, "gifts" and givers versus takers. None was definitive. It all just came down to numbers. By Nov. 6 enough registered Democrats had roused themselves, rubbed their sleepy eyes and trudged off to the polls to cast a ballot for their party's candidate. And they gave Obama a 3 million vote winning margin

The economy got just better enough, Romney had to make a big enough ideological pivot between the primaries and the general election to bring his political constancy into question. His own party was an anchor around his neck. Republican leaders and congressional candidates displayed a bewildering propensity for sticking their feet in their mouths on issues like voting rights, women's rights, immigration and foreign policy. Plus it's really hard to beat an incumbent.

But mostly, Obama won re-election the same way Grant won the Civil War. Superior numbers in the field. Not more motivated, more creative or more strategic, just more.

Obama won young voters big time. Women big time. Latinos big-time. Even Asians, big time. Blacks overwhelmingly. But while these outcomes may presage trends for a future that should make long-term Republican thinkers uneasy, still they don't have huge implications for the near future—say 2016. Note to Bill O'Reilly and Bernie Goldberg: by the next Presidential election the "white majority" as a component of the overall electorate is expected to shrink to 70%. Don't fret; you're still in charge, for the time being.

The big charge for Republicans in the next cycle is simply to create three million and one more Republicans. Or expunge three million Democrats. There are numerous paths to meeting that challenge, none requiring large-scale makeovers

In retrospect, trying to discourage as many Democrats as possible from voting was quite possibly the right strategy all along. Failure to execute against it may have cost Republicans the White House this time.

Now they have four more years to sharpen their game.

This day also marked the start of a new business year, a time for electing officials, making contracts, paying rent, hiring servants, holding court and starting school. (They had school?)

Scarborough Fair was a huge festival. It would begin on the Feast of the Assumption (August 15) and run for 45 days. The fair originated from a royal charter granted in 1253. Its fortunes started to flag after 1383, records show, but still it lasted into the late eighteenth century.

The town of Scarborough, on England's eastern seaboard in Yorkshire, was an important venue for tradesmen from all over England and beyond. The fair was basically a trading event, attended by merchants from all areas of England, Norway, Denmark, the Baltic states and the Byzantine Empire. In time it attracted not just buyers and sellers but also large crowds of tradesmen, entertainers, food purveyors and pleasure-seekers.

If you make enough of a name for yourself someone will write a song about you, and someone eventually did just that for the Scarborough Fair. No one knows who that was. Those things weren't as important back then. (There were no song royalties.) Centuries later, Simon and Garfunkel recorded it, in a matter of speaking.

Actually the song is written around, as opposed to about, Scarborough Fair The event serves mainly as a marker in the time-space continuum as it were.

The singer urges the listener, who may be going to the fair, to remember him to his former love and to give her a series of improbable tasks to perform if she would like to reconcile. The song was sometimes sung as a duet, with the woman then giving her lover a series of equally absurd-sounding tasks to perform first.

"Scarborough Fair" is one of the older traditional folk songs in the English language. And while nobody really understands what it's about, there's been a good deal of information published about it over the centuries.

Stories concerning impossible tasks for lovers or suitors were a popular meme in medieval folk songs. The tasks set forth are possibly riddles, and once the riddle is solved then the tasks make sense. Or maybe it means something else entirely in this case. For instance, maybe the scorned lover is dying on a battlefield and hallucinating as he speaks his last words to his comrades.

As the song spread, a number of different versions evolved, some with different melodies. Only a few are still sung nowadays.

In Medieval times, parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme were herbs associated with specific virtues. Parsley was comfort, sage was strength, rosemary was love, and thyme was courage.

Parenthetically, parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme, all members of the mint family, figured prominently in documented contraceptive and abortifacient herbal methods of the period.

They were also the main ingredients to an old witches love potion. The four herbs are also traditionally closely associated with death, as well as being used in charms to ward off the evil eye.

In one interpretation the lyrics refer to the black plague. Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme were also used to ward off the stench of the dead or dying. It was popularly believed in medieval times that the smell of the plague(s) (miasma) was responsible for infection and that herbs could be used to cleanse the air.

Paul Simon came across Scarborough Fair while touring in London in 1965. He learned it from a folk singer named Martin Cathy, who in turn had picked up the melody from a songbook by Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger. It had been recorded on a 1956 album, English Folk Songs, by Audrey Coppard.

Simon had accompanied singer Tom Paxton, to a dinner at Cathy's flat. "I wrote the whole thing down, with lyrics and chords, and handed it to him," Cathy recounted in an interview with The Telegraph in 2001.

The song became the lead track of Simon and Garfunkel's 1966 album, Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme. Interestingly, the album credits listed only Simon and Garfunkel as the song's authors, which drew some ill will from Martin Cathy. He felt the "traditional" source should have been credited.

The two made up even before the Telegraph interview. It turned out Simon had copyrighted only his revised arrangement and some additional lyrics. He had invited Cathy to sing the song with him at a London concert in 2000, and Cathy pronounced himself reconciled.

The Simon and Garfunkel version is actually a conflation of two songs: "Scarborough Fair" and parts of a song named "The Side of a Hill," written by Simon in 1963. The latter is a mournful lament about the accidental death of a young village child in a battle.

The formal name of their conflated version is "Scarborough Fair/Canticle." It was later released as a single after being featured on the soundtrack for the movie The Graduate in 1968.

Art Garfunkel is credited with interlacing the lines of "The Side of a Hill" (rewriting several as he went) with the verses of "Scarborough Fair," thereby turning the conflated song into a vague anti-war anthem, sort of, maybe. Opinions differ.

What people do agree on is that the most appropriate description of the combination of the melody and Garfunkel's angelic voice is "hauntingly beautiful." Those are the two words you most often encounter when people discuss "Scarborough Fair/Canticle."

Who did Simon and Garfunkel think the singer is, and what is his true intent? It's not really clear what they were going for with this song, other than "hauntingly beautiful." The only significant body of commentary exists in online forums, and those are mostly opinions. There is little that is definitive to be found on websites or in books.

Maybe lyrics don't matter all that much. Joe Williams, lead singer of the rock band Toto, once said of David Paich the group's composer: "He didn't care what the lyrics said. They didn't need to make sense. They just needed to sound good."

The ambiguities of the traditional lyrics of "Scarborough Fair" were the result of centuries of popular evolution. But Garfunkel introduces a number of very specific phrases in "Canticle" that were not in Simon's original lyrics and that are puzzling.

Phrases like "deep forest green" might just have offered a handy meter. But what inspired "War bellows blazing in scarlet battalions" or "Traces of sparrow on snow-crusted brown." Did they have a former life somewhere? Did he just make them up to fit? What is a blazing war bellows anyway? If you look up the term, you'll be referred to the lyrics.

Not Simon, not Garfunkel nor anyone else seems to have much to say about this part of the song. There's more annotation on Simon's whimsical "You Can Call Me Al" than on what is arguably the duo's signal signature opus. Half the time people don't even use the right title. They refer to the song as "Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Time."

In 1985 Simon and Garfunkel performed a reunion concert in New York's Central Park, arranged by New York City's Department of Parks Commissioner, Gordon Davis, and rock impresario Ron Delsner. It was called, fittingly, The Concert in the Park and was attended by 500,000 wildly appreciative fans.

It featured 21 songs, and "Scarborough Fair" was naturally among them. The whole thing was recorded as an HBO special and the subsequent live album went double-platinum. It was selling long after the duo had broken up again, this time for good. The video of the "Scarborough Fair" performance is included here for your viewing and listening pleasure.

This inclusion may seem like a bit of redundancy, but the clip makes three important things perfectly clear. One: Art Garfunkel really does have an angelic voice,. Two: Even in a live performance just these two men alone plus one guitar (okay, and a base) really could combine to produce a very full, complete and satisfying sound. Three: Not even Art Garfunkel can sing two different parts simultaneously in a live venue. No "Canticle" in this one.

Still, hauntingly beautiful. And even without "Canticle," "Scarborough Fair" is still pretty ambiguous. After all these years.

Okay, there's another summer squandered away because we were too busy, too distracted, too worried, too depressed, or just too hot, to focus and enjoy it the way we should have.

So what's important now is to take a moment and manufacture a few memories to carry along through dying autumn, chilly winter and soggy spring until our hearts can once again soar aloft, lifted by feelings of idyllic, idle youth and the smell of tanning lotion.

This should help. Here's the annual recap of what you were listening to on the Summer Song Jukebox these past months in those few, fleeting moments when you actually found yourself in the dreamy, sun-bronzed moment.

Department of miscellaneous stats: top states or regions

• Wisconsin
• Dublin
• Virginia
• Illinois
• New York
• California

Most listeners are in the US, but significant international audiences this summer included Ireland and, surprisingly, Hungary.

I'm moved to say, in passing, that I feel bad for The Beach Boys. Supplanted in their prime by The Beatles and The British Invasion, and now in their twilight years, superannuated in the fading memories of a younger musical audience. There was a time when they would have simply ruled this list, year in and year out.

The full summer playlist calls to my mind the group Buffalo Springfield, and a song not on the Jukebox, For What It's Worth.

Here is the bottom 10 Summer Song Jukebox playlist for summer 2012.

Okay, Vacation by Connie Francis I can understand, but these others surprise me. They could lead me to wonder if I might be getting old or at least out of touch. The bottom is not where one would think to look for a couple of these songs. And yet, the top 10 were pretty chestnutty in themselves. Only one song from the 21st century. Five from the '50s. And one from 1902? Maybe it's you guys who are getting old.

Anyway, you deserve one fleeting last moment here to reflect back on this summer just-past, before throwing yourself into the election and the global meltdown(s) of undefined but epic proportions that will undoubtedly overtake us no matter who wins.

Recall these words from Paul Simon And Art Garfunkel, from the Bookends album (1968).

Time it was and what a time it was, it was
A time of innocence, a time of confidences
Long ago, it must be, I have a photograph
Preserve your memories, they're all that's left you
(Bookends Theme)

Enjoy.

That would have been Mitt's early childhood, and it is by now farther back than most voters can cast their memories. John Stewart pointed out that his childhood recollections started much later, when they were burning churches in Mississippi and turning fire hoses and police dogs on marchers in Alabama.

With all due respect it's been a pretty rough ride since then, too. They started burning the jungles in Vietnam, then neighborhoods in LA and Newark, then college campuses. And then as if we hadn't had enough, foreign terrorists came next with their knock-off imports.

Plus, we had recessions: in 1960, 1969, 1973, 1980, 1981, 1990, 2000 and, let no one forget, 2007.

In point of fact, Mitt may not remember, but there were recessions in the '50s, too: 1953 and 1958. Oh, and troops were sent off to little Rock to integrate the schools, and Southeast Asia to fight the Korean War.

The good old days. It's your great-grandfather's meme. The opposite of the one where he used to walk three miles to and from school each day, uphill both ways. Ah, the mind: they say it's the second thing to go.

Time to start keeping an eye on him, especially around sunset, lest he start wandering. Not the time to be electing him President. We tried that with Reagan. At the end he forgot where Nicaragua was.

Last year, a piece on this website about candidates' ages pointed out that we've elected a President who was 65 or over just three times in 220 years. (12/18/11 -- Almost Dead Presidents) There are reasons for that. For one thing, we can no longer follow the references in their acceptance speeches. And then there's legitimate concern they can't either.

As the "Revolutionary Generation" moved from the euphoric abstractions of inspiration to the dull reality of governing, fissures opened and radiated. And the sibling rivalries grew more numerous and more intense.

Beyond such predictable competing interests as region, religion, philosophy, economics and even morality (slavery), the range of intense personal enmities grew downright hateful. They poisoned the young country's public institutions and made the tenor of political discourse harsh and shrill.

John Adams and Thomas Jefferson had cultivated a close personal bond while shaping the Declaration of Independence. Then they became the first two opponents in America's first contested Presidential Election. In no time they began to slander one another regularly in public. It took years after they'd both left Washington, and the persistent intercessions of friends, to restore the friendship.

Alexander Hamilton, our founding financier, disliked both men and worked energetically to destroy their careers and personal reputations. Adams lost his Presidential reelection bid in part due to a rear guard attack on his candidacy by his own party, guided by Hamilton.

Hamilton could not be truly called the father of political public relations in America (he was but one of many), but he certainly raised it to the level of high art. He published one broadside against Adams's character so hostile and vituperative (not to mention self-serving) that it damaged Hamilton's own political career, it so alienated even his own supporters. This from a guy who wasn't even running.

Jefferson, our third President, was a classic passive-aggressive personality and painfully shy. He may have penned the soaring prose of the Declaration of Independence, but during his whole time in Philadelphia at the First Continental Congress (where he was a late substitution) he spoke on few occasions and never memorably. That's why they had him write. They knew he couldn't talk.

Jefferson was a master at operating behind the scenes. Good with the stiletto, you might say. And he spent a good deal of his career conspiring against Hamilton.

Strangely, Jefferson owed his 1796 election over Adams at least in part to Hamilton. After conspiring first against Adams, Hamilton refocused his considerable political communications talents against Aaron Burr, who had tied Jefferson for the Electoral College vote. As bad as Hamilton thought Jefferson might be, he felt Burr would be worse.

Adams, a man of outsize intellect, and equally outsize ego, was not insensate to what was going on. He hated Hamilton. He gloated to friends about the deadlocked election: "The very man—the very two men—of all the world that he was most jealous of are now placed above him."

In truth, nobody, not even George Washington, had a good word for Aaron Burr. And none less so than Mrs. Hamilton. Burr would shoot and kill her husband in a duel arising from mutual personal slanders. (Bergen Co., NJ, indicted Burr for murder; at the time he was the sitting Vice President.)

Burr was eventually tried in federal court for treason, on an unrelated matter. Jefferson was a prime force in bringing the case to trial. Chief Justice John Marshall found Burr innocent. Jefferson and Marshall hated each other, too.

But the crowning rivalry was indisputably between Jefferson and Hamilton. Both members of Washington's Cabinet, these two men despised each other with a seething, blinding rage. For a non-believer, Jefferson was a very spiritual person. Hamilton hated Jefferson because he was afraid Jefferson, left to his own devices, would screw up the country. Jefferson hated Hamilton because he felt Hamilton was the essence of evil.

Jefferson tended not to see things in terms of right and left, or even right and wrong. He was more of a right-and-evil guy. The author Joseph Ellis said this in his biographical study of Jefferson, American Sphinx:

Wow, sound hauntingly familiar? It should be no great surprise that the founders of America's two-party political tradition were none other than these two guys. Hamilton led the Federalists, and Jefferson, although he was loathe to admit it in public, headed the Democratic-Republicans.

George Washington disliked political parties and hoped the country wouldn't go in that direction. He thought they served only to feed jealousies and animosity and "distract the Public Councils and enfeeble the Public administration." But political parties were a flood tide even the Father of our Country could not stave off. All that hatred needed some productive channeling.

Not that our earliest politicians couldn't be courtly and civil on some level. In the election of 1796, neither Jefferson nor Adams actively campaigned for the office of President. It was considered unseemly and reflective of an excess of personal ambition, and so both stayed at home.

That attitude didn't survive the next election, however. The Founding Father behind the organized political campaign for public office? Why, who else? Aaron Burr. His only founding contribution, actually. While Adams and Jefferson stayed on the sidelines in the Presidential Election of 1800, Burr decided it was time to hit the stump.

And it very nearly worked for him. Which is why, with varying degrees of rancor, they've been doing it ever since.

And let's not even talk about basketball. This town has even found a way to make Michael Jordan look bad.

Then the nation goes into an historic drought, and it starts raining here. It had been bone dry. Rainfall has been under average, often significantly so, every month going back to October.2011. (June-March is the wet season around here: averaging 12 inches in the period.) But rain started falling in May and has pretty much kept it up ever since. Charlotte: Monthly Rainfall vs. Monthly Averages

That was just before the air waves began to fill up with the news that 60% of the country was burning up in the worst drought to hit the country in 50 years.

May rainfall just got back up to average, June came in a notch above that. In July almost an inch more rain fell than Charlotte's highest monthly average (Feb: 4.4 in.).

August? It topped July's monthly rainfall in the first 10 days.

It's been hot enough. The Queen City has shared in the ultra-heated summer weather that has baked most of the country. July's average high temperature was 98° , about 10° above normal.

And the rain hasn't been falling monsoon-like. Most days are sunny and at worst a little overcast. But around supper time every second or third day or so, anywhere from a fraction to over an inch of rain falls in a couple of hours. Then the weatherman says it's going to clear up for the next couple of days, only it never does.

And the rain is starting to get heavier. Nine days in May, 16 days in July and now five out of 10 days in August with three days recording from just under to just over two inches.

So far all this rain has merely brought the yearly total back up to just under average. But one is inclined to wonder, unless the weather gods are planning the meteorological equivalent of a double-dip recession, where we might be headed from here. There's only one big river around here (although with two branches), but there's a lot of creeks. Up until now they've just been kind of cute and picturesque. They look different when they start running through your back yard.

You know, usually when you come to a national political convention, what you want to bring along is a good pair of rubber boots, and tall ones at that. But someone should tell those Democrats to pack a good umbrella, too, this time. Especially if they plan to be out after dark. Perhaps even a boat.

These days I don't do much of anything about anything. But I will talk about the weather.