|
November 5, 2008
Obama "could actually win this thing" as many voters have job security in a depressed economy on their minds. That change is what is dawning on Americans. The dream of change will happen and become political reality. What kind of change though?
There is still the election. How significant will be the Bradley effect---where people say they're going to vote for Obama but in the privacy of the voting booth, they won't vote for a black man? Will the Rovian sludge and sleaze work on voters and save the Republicans? Will the US change from being a center-right country". Or will the entire "center" shift leftwards?
Leak
Will the voters reject the GOP's claim that the war in Iraq is the "front line of the war on terror"? Maybe today's election will witness the end of the Republican era in American politics; one that began in reaction to Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, the Vietnam war and the civil rights revolution; a conservative movement pioneered by Richard Nixon, consolidated by Ronald Reagan, and was then shattered by George W Bush.
It would be great to watch the hissy fits on Fox News as a form of US comedy show as the results in favvour of the Democrats come in. (I don't have cable in Adelaide). The Fox line is that African-Americans are cheating and stealing the election for Obama, and Obama is going to take the white people's money and give it to African-Americans with a new welfare program. Socialism! Obama is Karl Marx reincarnate. Obama is a commie!
That kind of crazy scare won't work. American wants change. They want the Republicans out. They want to kick Bush into history.
Does Sarah Palin represent the end of an era of culture wars, and be the last culture warrior on a national ticket? Well, she'll be going back to Alaska to lick her wounds amongst those moose shooting social conservatives; the ones who reckon that humans walked the earth with dinosaurs 6000 years ago and who desire God's dominion on earth.
Update
CNN has called the election for Obama, who ran a superb bottoms-up electoral campaign. It's a historic moment for the USA, given its racist past and the shameful way that it has treated its African-American citizens since the civil war. America has now shifted centre-left. I guess we are going to hear a lot more about American exceptionalism about how only America can make such a big political change in the US media.
McCain's speech is gracious in defeat and he acknowledges the historic significance of a black President of the US. He speaks honestly ---he was himself, speaking as an elder statesman of the Senate, not as the presidential candidate. McCain's crowd was as ugly as he was gracious.
The opening of Obama's 'Yes we can' speech:
If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible; who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time; who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.
It’s the answer told by lines that stretched around schools and churches in numbers this nation has never seen; by people who waited three hours and four hours, many for the very first time in their lives, because they believed that this time must be different; that their voice could be that difference. It’s the answer spoken by young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Latino, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled – Americans who sent a message to the world that we have never been a collection of Red States and Blue States: we are, and always will be, the United States of America.
It’s the answer that led those who have been told for so long by so many to be cynical, and fearful, and doubtful of what we can achieve to put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day.
It’s been a long time coming, but tonight, because of what we did on this day, in this election, at this defining moment, change has come to America.
I love that phrase--- to put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day. He adds that this is not the change we seek, but only the chance for the change we seek.
Bush and his cronies are history. That's worth a drink isn't it. The Americans see Obama's victory as representing a decisive transition into the future. There was a sense that an America that could do this was a different America than the one we had been living in for the past few years.
|
Josh Marshall puts it well: