I'm an old white guy. I go to old white guy places. Diners. Cigar stores. Bars on side streets. Libraries. I carry a pocketknife.

This means I should have known Mitt Romney would be the next president, if only because the other old white guys told me so.

As a partisan of nothing, I dislike Mitt Romney because he reminds me of every corporate rump-smooch who ever sent me an interoffice email questioning my "commitment" to whatever stupid "initiative" the company was forcing into one or another of my tender recesses.

I dislike Barack Obama because he reminds me of these artificially cheerful, grant-money-sucking bums who invariably run most of the "youth outreach" programs in the country.

Ah, but many of my old white guy buddies made the Romney choice easily. Romney, after all, was going to knock those fat-assed black ghettoized Wal-Mart shoppers into line. Romney was going to hump the poor who, we are endlessly told, grow rich and happy on government money and housing. Ever been in a housing project? I have. I'm a newspaper reporter. It sucks to live in a housing project.

I don't object to people voting for meaningless, fact-drained slogans. It's your vote, Jimbo.

But, as someone who had no investment in either candidate, the idea that Romney would win was foolish. Tight popular vote. Romney massacred in the Electoral College. That was the line the day the betting opened and the line minutes before the final results came in.

And my friends — old, plaid-wearing white guys like me — weren't angered by Romney's loss.

They were smashed into silence, and in the weeks since the election, the silence has roared. I've heard some grumbling, some dark muttering about socialism, but in general I've heard nothing but nothing, and all of it accompanied by jaw muscles drawn tighter than guitar strings.

Mitt Romney ran Ronald Reagan's old campaign, which was Richard Nixon's old campaign, which worked, both times, but which will not work anymore. Romney could have won a coup, but he couldn't win an election.

And my buddies, my poor, wounded buddies, they knew, someplace deep down, down where you believe in your wife's fidelity and your own sexual prowess, they knew Mitt Romney would win. Some of them presented me with elaborate scenarios detailing a Romney triumph in the Electoral College. Others based their pick on the fact that people's "eyes were finally open" about the stink of Kenyan/Muslim socialism they said followed Obama like the garbage smell follows a trash truck.

And when it came, when the numbers were in, they shut up, finally, sadly, jaw-grindingly stuck with the fact that, given a choice, the American people chose left over right, black over white, chose the inefficient, bumbling compassion of a limping, mismanaged government over the glitteringly cruel, equally mismanaged world of corporate America, which shouts "self-reliance" and whispers "screw the poor."

I took no particular joy in Obama's victory, but I took great joy in Romney's defeat, since it meant the defeat of the bosses, and I have had a boss all my life.

And I am achingly sorry for my friends who are now silently reckoning with irreversible fact.

Because I'm an old white guy, too.

To find out more about Marc Munroe Dion and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com. Marc Munroe Dion's books, "Between Wealth and Welfare: A Liberal Curmudgeon in America" and "Mill River Smoke," are available on iTunes, Amazon.com and Nook.