Turning the Page

This is a good day for America and so promising for its future. I'm struggling to find an apt way to put what I'm feeling. I'm not as articulate about it as I'd like, because I don't quite grasp it as something fully formed in my mind.  But it's as if the fever with its delirium has broken, and while we still don't feel very well, and we're still weak and woozy lying there in sweat-soaked sheets, we feel that a shift has occurred--that we're going to get better. And all the people who care about us, sitting  silently on vigil at our bedside, worried to death about whether we would pull through, are now chatting, smiling, and relieved. At least that's how I feel this evening, relieved and proud that Americans could deliver for this unlikely candidate such a resounding, decisive victory. We haven't chosen utopia; we've simply chosen health.

There is nothing but upside, and whatever the reasons--the economy, wanting to punish Bush, Sarah Palin, the war--Americans, whether they consciously intended it or not, have chosen to put the man in office who has the most potential to effect a necessary transition from a sick America to a healthier America. In the coming months and years deologues of the left and the right will complain and criticize about the particulars--and I will, too--but at a more fundamental level we have chosen to get better rather than to remain ill. And today that's all that matters.

We've been pluralist for a long time, but it has sickened us. It has been confusing and scary for so many people. The importance of this moment is not primarily Obama's potential to effect new, specific policies, liberal or otherwise--we will judge his effectiveness as policymaker and statesman four years or eight years from now--but now something already is significantly effected. We have turned a page in our understanding about American identity. And with that comes new possibilities that were unimaginable even a few years ago--especially in the aftermath of November 2004. The idea of those charming kids playing at home in the White House and out on the lawn--and that becoming something that all of us come to think of as normal--that this family is now to be our first family. It's just hit me how hugely significant that is.

"Real America", as the Sara Palins define it, has just been dealt a significant blow. Her party has relied on a narrow, primitive imagination of what it means to be an American, and its exponents will be pushed to the margins of relevancy as the new, but not yet realized, richer imagination about who we are pushes its way to the center.  It's what we have always been; it's just that we haven't really been able to embrace it and to accept it, and really to celebrate it.  Obama will help us to realize what America has always been in potentia and to be ok with it, and to move beyond all the ways old America has restricted us as a people.

I'm not saying that there won't be backwaters of resistance, but that we have just experienced a tipping point, and the things that seemed to matter so much to so many about race and ethnicity and Otherness will stop mattering. We've tipped over into another space where  almost everyone will soon, maybe in two or three years, will be wondering why we ever thought or felt such things--the way it's hard for adults to remember what they felt and thought when they were children.  It will become an irrelevancy. A significant majority of Americans have made the grownup choice.  They have put aside their age old resentments and fears and have embraced competency and sanity.  It's a good day for America.

Comments

[Guy Fawkes]

There's no need for me to try and sound valedictory, Jack - but I thank you for your time and effort on this site. I look forward to all of your posts.

Now, on to the new era - if it is indeed a new era - as elated as I feel, I also feel oddly sober (and I did have a generous helping of Woodford Reserve Bourbon last night at my "victory shindig").

The image I would use about what occurred in our nation yesterday is that we were on the edge of a ravine on a crumbling rock wall, and at the last moment, we turned around, extended our hands, found a small mass of solid rock, and pulled ourselves up and onto more solid ground, and our panicked heart stopped racing.

The ground may crumble again - but at least we will know what it is to be on terra firma again.

May God bless and keep our President-Elect and our country.

[Matt Zemek]

Jack,

You offer a solid perspective, especially when you talk of your relief, the awareness of a tipping point in the country, and bad news for "Real America."

For me, this is a glass-half-full (not half-empty) election.

The very bad news is that we still have shocking levels of polarization. 48 percent of the country did NOT vote for Obama, in a year where the Republicans had nothing going for them and Obama ran an operationally flawless campaign. If ever there was a year when a tsunami was justified for all possible reasons, the Dems didn't get it, and underperformed in the Senate races.

In assessing the presidential election, small but vital segments of the Midwest (Indiana and Ohio) seemed to grudgingly concede that the economy was too important for culture-war issues to enter into the mix, and that Obama was better-suited to handle economic issues.

In places like Colorado, Virginia and North Carolina, shifting demographics enabled the Dems to get enough youth and minority votes to tilt the electoral calculus.

This is where the good news comes in.

The best part of this election is that it marked the beginning of the decline of the God-Gays-Guns approach in the GOP. Too many minorities, too many young people, and too many college graduates exist for the GOP to use its old Moral Majority/Morning in America/Reagan Mythology voodoo. The Republican Party, from now on, will have to speak a lot more about policy and a lot less about ideology, winning young people and minorities with sensible proposals. Think immigration and education in particular.

The Democratic coalition was clearly more unified this time, while the Republicans experienced a split between their Yin and Yang. Culturally conservative and economically liberal Republicans like Mike Huckabee could not get along with culturally liberal and economically conservative guys like Rudy Giuliani. McCain reached out to the former and spurned the latter, increasing his popular vote share (in states that were solidly Red to begin with) but killing him in every electoral battleground state. The GOP has to have serious conversations about mending that rift if they want to win again, because the Dems' yellow-dog conservatives and true-blue progressives are much more unified right now.

True, the Dems' coalition might fragment if one side perceives that it's getting short shrift from the Obama Administration, but it remains that the Republicans will have to broaden their appeal... maybe not in 2012 if Obama struggles enough, but definitely by 2020. In the coming decades, the Republicans will no longer be able to to God, Gays and Guns, and that is the one big reason why long-term political hope is justified.

In the short run of things, I'm simply glad that our nation has, for once, lived up to its creed and its promise of an unlimited horizon of possibility for all people, regardless of the color of their skin.

[Bill Goodwin]

Last night a shadow lifted from my mind which had hung there so long it took me a moment to recognize it, and to finally realize how much it had oppressed me.

More than anything else might have, the election of Barack Obama somehow dispersed the shadow of 911. Which says a lot, I guess, about what that shadow (for me) really was.

[Jack Whelan]

Amen, bro.

[valerius]

Matt,

I also expected a bigger 'tsunami' to hit, but it didn't. I agree that there was an under-performance among Democratic Senatorial candidates and that Obama barely squeezed by McCain in many states. If ever there was a year for a tsunami, this was it. The fact that Obama only won by 5-6% points in a year when Republicans had campaigned under terrible circumstances with a weak candidate who ran a weak campaign is a little scary.

I fear that like Clinton in '92, Obama's election as a president was due more to his charisma and personal appeal than to his actual policies. That is, if Republicans were not the in-party during this terrible financial crisis or if the financial crisis failed to happen, the issues very well could have been Gods, gays, guns, and culture yet again. I wonder how much of this Democratic majority is attributable to their policies as opposed to having the fortune of being an out-party during one president's terrible run. Obama better produce.

[Jack Whelan]

One of the basic keys for me in thinking about this election was to try not to see it in the rear-view mirror. The pundit class tends to do that, to assume that past predicts the future, and usually it does, except when the culture/society is ready for a shift.

From the beginning Obama seemed to me to be too good to be true, that he couldn't possibly overcome his liabilities, but a perfect storm occurred, and his election was really very easy.

He's the man for the hour, and if I'm right about that, we'll see a different landscape in the future than what we have come to assume is normal political and social reality.

The country wants to change, it just needs someone to show them how. Kennedy, for however little he actually accomplished legislatively was such a transitional figure, and he wouldn't have been elected if it hadn't been for shenanigans in Chicago. But he won the country over, except for the extremists on the right. I think we're in a similar situation now. People can be won over if they're relatively sane; they just need time to make the adjustment.

[Guy Fawkes]

Matt, I'd dispute whether we are as polarized as the stats suggest.

Although turnout reached very high levels, there was still nearly 40% of the country who could have voted but did not. Who are they and what are their voices? Were they just lazy, busy, apathetic? What do they care about? And all the people who voted for McCain couldn't be wingnuts to a man.

Some just genuinely didn't like Obama's politics, and may have had nothing irrational or racial in play. Obama may (although I'm pessimistic about this) get re-elected with higher percentages in 4 years by people who once voted for McCain.

We've still got these two major parties sucking up nearly all the oxygen, and the simple reality still is that they fight for the middle--one just lost it badly this year, but it's tough to ever say what all the reasons why were when those votes were cast.

[Matt Zemek]

Guy:

Jack or someone else could correct me on this, but when Regan won in conditions that were completely favorable to Republicans, he kicked butt. 1980 was 54 to 39 over Carter, with Jack Anderson getting 7 percent.

1984 was the ultimate tsunami, 525-13 in the electoral college and 61-39 in the popular.

Obama is the first Democrat since Carter to get more than 50 percent in an election, and Carter got only 51.

So I'm not talking about just polarization; I'm talking about how Democrats haven't gotten a tsunami since LBJ in '64, against the other Arizonan to lose the presidency. Our country is still in the grip of the forces Jack's been writing about, and as he eloquently said, we're still sick, even though a remedy could be in the offing.

Obama simply has to get this first half of his first term exactly right, or else....