Julia Ioffe is a writer living in New York.
As a wonderfully menacing Christmas card sent out by the Oklahoma GOP last month reminded us, Oklahoma was the only state in the Union to go completely and utterly red: Not one county--and only one of the state's 2249 precincts--voted for the Obama/Biden ticket in November. ("It was god, guns, and gays with a little bit of race thrown in there," a local Democrat quipped bitterly.) And yet, two months later, a crowd of 800 Oklahomans merrily rang in the Obama presidency on Sunday night at the Museum of the American Indian. A sense of marvelous good luck (for some) and of smirking at the gods (for others) permeated a crowd that had as many Native Americans as ten-gallon hats and bright blonde coiffures. Tribal chiefs and Air Force ROTC high schoolers mingled with state representatives, local business people, and young couples around piles of jalape