America Renewed
In Los Angeles County, where the polls closed after Obama’s election was a foregone conclusion, 81% of registered voters marked a ballot. When year after year voter participation rates hovered around 50%, I often felt like our democracy was losing its essence.
But not this morning.
Or as a New York Times correspondent writing from the Gaza Strip in Palestine put it,
From far away, this is how it looks: There is a country out there where tens of millions of white Christians, voting freely, select as their leader a black man of modest origin, the son of a Muslim. There is a place on Earth — call it America — where such a thing happens.
At 8 PM in Los Angeles last night, when NBC called the election for Obama, I looked around my living room full of friends, many of them with tears streaming down their faces, and tried to think back if there had ever been a political moment like this in our lives. Most of us are in our late 50′s or early sixties, though there was a group of our children in their 20′s as well–and I concluded that there had not been such a moment of joy in our political lives.
We cannot underestimate the herculean task that lies before Barack Obama. Though I have been on his side from the very beginning of his Presidential journey, we cannot expect that the accumulated mistakes of 30 years of neoconservative philosophy to be quickly erased. In his victory speech, echoing Dr. King’s prophetic words from Memphis, Barack indicated the steepness of the hill to climb.
The road ahead will be long, our climb will be steep.We may not get there in one year or even one term, but America, I have never been more hopeful than I am tonight that we will get there. I promise you, we as a people will get there.
One last thought. Obama’s victory margin of 7 million votes (52%-46%) is a major landslide, the likes of which we haven’t seen since 1984. The Republican Party must now rethink its role in America’s renewal. McCain tried in his concession speech to begin to close some wounds that he and Palin had worked viciously to open in this last month. The boos from his crowd,when he mentioned Barack’s name, are a testament to the politics of fear that have been the defining tactic of Republicans since 2000. They must now realize that their view is not shared by the majority of Americans. The Palin/Limbaugh wing of the party will want to start an immediate guerrilla movement to delegitimize Obama. McCain and the cooler heads in the center right must prevail.
They have one choice–you are either part of the problem or part of the solution.
Muchisimas Gracias, Eduardu y su muchacho Gage, y su compadre de Gage, Don Taplin. Gracias, Senor, y Mil Felicades. Felicidades, y por La Union Estados Unidos y por La Republica California, Vaya
con Dios!
hugo
…perdon: “EduardO.”
I see 52% to 46% giving the impression of a landslide when compared to the last two razor close U.S Presidential elections – but on their own those aren’t the numbers of a landslide.
The joy at having Obama rather than McCain and the delight of a few historical firsts are obviously making people ebullient, but personally I don’t see Obama as having got an overwhelming mandate.
If 46% of an unusually large turn out still voted against him and wanted the Republican candidate in power it doesn’t look like a momentous change in opinion and attitude across the country so much as a typical (in democratic countries) change in party with the country taking a different though not radical tack.
Obama will still need to cultivate wider support if he plans on doing something radically challenging to the status quo. Hopefully that’ll come with sarisfaction with his performance as it unfolds.
Ideally, to get fundemental changes, he’ll have a succesful first term and take that to the electorate for a mandate to be more radical next term.
Well now I’ve read this string entire, and now I really am a bit awestruck at what Jon and his Barack hath wrought. I am with Mr. Masters, who cautions us to keep it up lest we look back someday from this one and ask, “what we might” have done.
I’m with the eloquent newcomer Lumineaux also, and with Jeff, and Terry whose butterfly wings flapped this day. With all of you, too, who ache for the passage or else the tentative failure of California’s Proposition 8.
But also I am an historian who goes to 1948, when two friends, like magi, took trains, buses and to foot to meet their consumptive “Socialist” friend from The War, Orwell, in the peaty Coast, to encourage him to make his last political testament, a book that was to be called, simply, “1984″. Why did the friends go, the one of them a classically trained “Conservative” book critic of the Sunday Times [of London], the other a jack Fabian? Because they, all three, were friends of the Fourth Estate, the two of them simply friends of George.
…also, I am in County Cork about ten years later, with the avowedly Communist Claude Cockburn who was then on the lam from London taxation and with the avowedly brilliant but secretly literary American film director John Huston on the lam from taxation American. And who was the Third that time? A magus from 1948, the selfsame, ever-confused journalist Malcolm Muggeridge, later The Muse of one Wm. F. Buckley, Jr., of the USA.
Journalism, what we now can call only Communications, makes for strange company. Even on this day, President Elect Day. They thought then that they were the last of the Fourth (er, a Fifth thereof), you see. And so did I think, yesterday.
But no. Look at this thing, this thing that Jon and Barack, between them, have done.
“Truly it is the Lord’s work in our eyes [well, in mine, anyway], and it is marvelous.”
Thank you, Jon and all. You restoreth my soul…
The Reign of Terror is over.
…except for ze media, I trust, my VBM…
That rain is never over. I am talking about The Reign of Terror©. (Or The Reign of Terr, if you prefer.)
Ah, yes. Ze pitchforks actuel.
Well, as I was saying…
I am waiting such the long time…
Anyway, that is my toast… and I’m sticking with it.
Alex. Yes. Well said.
And speaking of well said, perhaps another side benefit to an Obama presidency will be a general rising of the tide when it comes to political discourse, (and that includes speechifyin’), as opposed to the garbled syntax that has defined the Bush era, and was sinking to an even more astonishing low with Palin. One hopes.
VBM, Salut.
And now who’s “sticking…it” to whom?
!!!
For the sake of clarity:
By “VBM” I intended then and hereinafter, “Vote By Mail”;
By “sticking…it” I intended of course to refer to the British obsession with putting a bit of Stick about; hence,
Nothing of the above from the scrum was at all, in any way, Cricket,
As neither is my full intention of defeating Sen. Saxby Chambliss, of Georgia, in the immediately ensuing runoff election…
…to paraphrase the late Molly, You jes’ might need a Georgian for this Georgia thing…
The rich can afford to be tax expats…
Phew. Reading that was exhausting…
Anyway, on a lighter note and in honour of the soon-to-be-ex President Bush, let us now look back on this frighteningly accurate description of what his Presidency was going to look like, written in January 2001, as he first took office:
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/28784
How scary is that?
With 70 days left to go, is anyone watching Bush?
George W. Bush has done so much to damage this country, it is a relief to have Obama elected.
But 70 days is a long time… and Bush could still make the mess he created worse. What could he do with the military, say, by creating a shakeup with Iran? Or how could he make the financial crisis be worse?
And Cheney… Cheney is still in place and he worries me more than Bush, primarily because we NEVER see what he is doing.
One thing the blogs will do is stay as much on top of Bush as possible.
I hope.
Under The LobsterScope
The worry would not be Bush doing something dangerous. He will be packing up and getting out as fast as is legal. There is some bloodletting going on in the Republican Party but that is normal after a major defeat for any party. They will be inventorying assets and I wouldn’t make too much of what is said for the next month or so because the hired guns are jockeying and the FUD will fly. Let them pass. Energy spent on the great get even is wasted except in the cases where criminal acts have been committed. As good as it would feel, wasting the time to the midterms pursuing indictments will only cause other more important work to go undone. Exceptions are high crimes, IMO.
As to security, the worry and I think minor is that during the transition another entity decides to exploit the tentativeness of leadership during the next two months. There are some signs of that coming from Russia. Big powers probe each other’s perimeters constantly. Obama is getting his first in depth security briefing today so the full scope and detail of the problems will be clear to him. Watch his speeches over the next week even as he is assembling his cabinet.
Some random thoughts on universal broadband follow.
This isn’t my area of expertise but as a vendor of PHIN-compliant health systems that also support other public safety services, the demand for use of broadband by private and public resources is skyrocketing and competing. The competition for the Universal Service fees allocation seems to be increasing including more emergency services (eg, telematics) with passalong costs and a need to prioritize available bandwidth in emergencies. There is competition also from the health industry linking up the rural health providers for day to day alerting and case notification messaging.
Some of that traffic is fat and bursty (wrap CAP inside EDXL over eBXML and we are sending a few hundred bytes wrapped in multi kilobytes of metadata per message – say verbose but the result of demands for interoperability and standardization without enough implementation to proof the standards in a real world environment).
HL7 was originally more efficient prior to the shift to XML. It was harder and more expensive to implement.
So pay some attention to the situation of emergency services. In some cases, radio and landline telephone are simply better and it may be the case that a tradeoff is necessary in which messages go into which systems.
Broadband didn’t become a necessity for me until the son started college and important lessons were conducted online. Requirements such as that suggest that broadband quit being a luxury and are now utilities the same as electrical power in the home. It may be the case that metered access is inevitable although that is a real can of worms.
In the last race for governor here, it was noted that broadband access to every part of the state was desirable but not physically available to the rural counties. Even where I live just outside of a major technical center, the last hundred yards were a problem unless one bought it from the cable provider. DSL finally got here but DSL is not that reliable. A state by state survey of resources should be made if it hasn’t already, or the mandate will sit umiplemented similar to the 9-11 (the service not the event) location services even as the fees are collected.
The latest voter data seems to suggest that fewer Republicans voted in this past election than in the last two. Listeners to Conservative radio talk shows could see it coming. Many callers expressed their contempt for John McCain for not being a true Conservative.
Others said that they didn’t see the point in electing a Republican president who would not be able to accomplish anything with a Democratic majority in both houses of Congress. They wanted Barack Obama to win, they said, so that America would see the harmful effects of the Liberal agenda first-hand.
I am more concerned about the strength of this country, however, than to wish it ill for political reasons. I hope they are wrong and that the Obama presidency turns out to be an amazing success.
I am skeptical, however, since the economic numbers just don’t add up. I hope for all of our sakes that I am wrong!
A “true conservative”…what is that? Limbaugh? Hannity? or are you thinking more in the Buckley line? It would seem that the mantle of “true conservative” has been taken up (or stolen) by the hate spewing assholes. Thinking, reasoned conservatives seem to be in hiding, not wanting to be tarred with the same brush as their hot headed, puke spewing brethren. I think a lot of the thinking man’s conservatives see hope in Obama.
The economic numbers just don’t add up… Who stacked the numbers that way? A bunch of cowboy “free market” (as long as it’s free for them) Wall St. types did…the Republican base heros…the “greed is good” crowd. Obama is being handed the shitty end of the stick even before day one as GWB scrambles to get out of the line of blame fire. You can bet that George is very happy that a president can only get two terms these days. He’d have had on hell of a time just hanging onto being nominated this year, and he’d have been the biggest loser of all times if he’d run.
So it’s time for renewal, and time to give Obama all the help he can get. He seems to be a good man and a wise one. May he be this generation’s Lincoln or FDR. May he not die in office, though.
zestypete, I am disappointed. I don’t see you offering to help me disappoint Saxby, right here in his very stronghold, in a runoff that may determine the fillibuster powers of the U.S. Senate under an Obama Administration.
What is WRONG with my smug Democrats just now? Flush with victory, are we? Did I not warn you of smugness, especially at a time like this?
Come on now: What then shall I mark upon my sandwich boards, upon the leaflets I shall drop to the richest MF’s in all Georgia State?
There are any number of ways to contribute, but here’s one appeal for assistance in defeating Saxby and putting Jim Martin in the Senate in his place.
Thanks, Seth.
And, say, you’re not a Bo[w]les too, are you? Because then you and I really WOULD be cousins, as Alex and I just possibly may be…
As I’m divorce-poor, Seth, I believe I’ll just stand out on the most prominent corner in Saxby’s affluent GOP base, Cobb County, with a sandwich board that reads, on the front, “Our Saxby’s a fine ole liar, but…” and, on the back, “the time for Pluto-krats is OVER!”
That ought to be good for swinging a few money-votes…