The Day After

For the past 24 hours I’ve been trying to think of something worthy to write. I’ve come up with nothing. It seems as though I lack the vocabulary necessary to express the magnitude of what happened Tuesday night. There were many things I planned to say in the event of an Obama victory, many more in the event of a McCain comeback. But very few of them now seem big enough for the moment.

So, instead of trying to cobble together something that may or may not resemble coherent writing, I’ve decided to try something else. In this post I’ll share some of my thoughts about the election and other items in the news this past week. Then on Friday, after I’ve had a chance to digest it, I’ll offer my thoughts on the meaning of this election.

First, to state the obvious. At 11:00 p.m. Tuesday, November 4th, 2008, Senator Barack Obama defeated Senator John McCain to become the 44th President Elect of the United States of America.

North Carolina and Missouri have still not completed counting their votes. But at this point, that doesn’t matter. Despite record voter turnout, both Florida and Ohio somehow managed to conduct an election cleanly and efficiently, without any major technical difficulties. That in and of itself has got to be some kind of miracle.

A mea culpa. I have always believed that America would elect a female president before a black president. Obviously, I was wrong. I apologize.

Many interesting images from Tuesday night that will remain with me for some time to come;

Kudos to John McCain for one of the classiest concession speeches I’ve ever heard. Obviously a difficult, emotional moment for him, handled with the stoicism and grace befitting a U.S. Senator and military man.

Contrast the crowd at the McCain rally with the crowd at the Obama rally. One of them resembled my neighborhood, one of them didn’t.

It was moving to see all the people in all the crowds nationwide who broke down in tears at the announcement of Obama’s victory. It was the first time I can remember seeing Jesse Jackson speechless. Oprah sounded about as delirious and incomprehensible as Kevin Garnett did the night the Celtics won the NBA title. In Times Square, a tall smiling black man turned to the two young white women standing beside him and embraced them, as they embraced him. But the image I think I will remember most was that of ABC News anchor Charles Gibson holding back tears as he watched the reaction around the world and tried to describe the emotions present in what he was seeing. Gibson is a hardened old news man. He’s covered wars and famines and celebrations and other presidential elections, all without betraying his emotions. The fact that he was unable to do so in this instance speaks volumes to the significance of that moment.

Kenya has declared November 4th, Obama Day.

Can we please, please, PLEASE get rid of this ridiculous electoral college? I'm told that the electoral college was originally conceived to prevent large urban population centers in certain regions of the country from dominating national politics. So instead, every four years, the rest of the country is held hostage for 10 months by six undecided yahoos in Ohio and the world shuffleboard champion retirement community in the southwest suburbs of Orlando. Why on earth can we not just send the candidate with the most votes to the White House? Why do we insist on making things so much more difficult than they need to be?

On Tuesday night the longest presidential campaign in history came to an end. I tried desperately to come up with a list of things I will miss about the campaign. I failed miserably. But I did find a few things I certainly WILL NOT miss.

1. Polls. I don’t want to hear about polls until 2012. Numbers, internals, sampling sizes, margins of error, I’m tired of it all and I want it to go away. For the next 3 1/2 years, I don’t want to hear the word mentioned unless it is preceded by the word telephone, or followed by the word vault.

2. Joe the Plumber. What did we do to deserve to have this fraud perpetrated upon us? You know what, on second thought, I don’t care. Joe is just trying to make a name for himself the good old-fashioned time-honored American way, by hiring and agent and attempting to parlay his fifteen seconds of fame and three weeks of campaign infamy into a book deal, Congressional run and country music recording contract. He is doing his best to ensure that he will ultimately be negatively affected by President-elect Obama’s tax plan. Who among us wouldn’t do the same?

3. The triumph of the ordinary over the extraordinary. This is intricately related to the previous item. There was nothing special about Joe Wurtzelbacher. He assembled pipes for a living. Nothing wrong with that. But nothing special either. Yet in his desperate search for a horse to hitch his campaign to, McCain elevated Joe to a stature greater than even that of his own. He became Joe the Symbol, the jingle for the absurd concept that if we simply eliminated taxes we could all wake up tomorrow in some capitalist utopia where everyone is a satisfied self-employed millionaire, and the rest of the world cowers in fear and grovels at our feet. The problem is that there was nothing special about Joe Wurtzelbacher. And when we elevated ordinary people to the status of heroes, we diminish real heroes - like John McCain. Heroes perform above and beyond the call of duty. John McCain chose to remain in captivity, rather than go home and leave his fellow soldiers to their fate in that Vietnamese prison. Yet for some reason, he allowed the non-story of some guy asking a question to overshadow the story of his own very real accomplishments.

4. The CNN “Magic Wall”. If you’re going to construct a gigantic video screen on which to display pretty little graphics and flashing lights, make sure you can fit the whole thing on screen in a single shot. Poor design.

5. The “Bradley Effect”. Do some people tell pollsters they will vote for a black candidate, then do the opposite in the solace of the voting booth? I don’t know. But the day before the election, polling indicated that Obama held a less than one percent lead over McCain in my state of Indiana - a state which had not voted for a Democrat, let alone a black man, in almost half-a-century. Analysis of the numbers the day after the election shows that Obama carried Indiana by less that one percent. This is not the same country in which Tom Bradley ran for mayor 26 years ago.

Finally, one of the most important outcomes of this election is the repudiation of the politics of fear and personal destruction. Karl Rove was not the first political operative to engineer a presidential campaign based on the fear and loathing of one’s opponent. But his campaigns were arguably some of the most effective. Rick Davis attempted the same thing against Barack Obama on behalf of John McCain. And the result is confirmation of his utter failure. From day one of the general election campaign, McCain’s strategists looked at the political landscape and knew they had little to no substance to run on. So they designed a campaign that would spend much - if not most - of it’s time attempting to tear down the opponent. They threw every single frightening label at Obama hoping something would stick. They called him unpatriotic, elitist, mysterious and risky. They called him a Muslim, a socialist, a radical and a terrorist sympathizer. They accused him of associating with militants, bombers, racists and nationalists. They insinuated that he was unqualified, and dangerous, anti-American and simply “not like us.” They ran a a campaign filled with “we don’t know” and “he might be” and “there’s no evidence”. It would have been so easy for people to be overwhelmed by the negativity and run screaming at the sight of their own shadows. But at least 62 million people stood up and said to Karl Rove and Rick Davis that we may not know everything we want to know about Barack Obama, but we will not be coerced into loathing, or controlled by our fear of another American citizen. Not this time. To paraphrase Vice President-elect Joe Biden, for 22 months they called Barack Obama every name they could think of. Now they can call him President of the United States of America.