Archives for November 2008

A lot of people are upset that the Democrats didn’t go all vindictive on Joe Lieberman and boot him from his committee chairmanship. I have no love for Lieberman and detest his choice to stump for the Republicans this year. But I think I understand what Barack Obama was up to in pushing the Senate Democrats to bury the hatchet.

Obama spent most of the marathon campaign that just ended telling people that he wanted to move beyond the old partisan politics. Having won the election, he now faces a set of problems of a magnitude we haven’t faced since the 1930s. Just as Obama was Mr. Consistency on the campaign trail, sticking to the same themes and policies across the states and months, so, I think, he wants to demonstrate consistency from the campaign through the transition into government. “Remember what I said on the trail?” he’s in effect saying. “I meant it. And I’m going to act on it.”

A president with that sort of carry-through would be something extraordinary — and unfamiliar. I understand why Obama partisans might discount the promise of transcending partisanship as being so much blather. Our last president made campaign noises about “being a uniter, not a divider” and proceeded to pursue an intensely divisive agenda with the thinnest of mandates.

After such an experience, we can be forgiven for collectively discounting all talk of moving beyond the old battles. But I think Obama meant it, and means it, and means to see what happens when a president actually tries to deliver on that promise. While removing Joe Lieberman from his post might satisfy many an activist’s sense of justice, it won’t move us any closer to fixing the economy, reforming healthcare, or reversing the Bush Administration’s destruction of our functioning government. Whereas holding on to Lieberman’s vote in the Senate might.

In other words, settling scores is, and ought to be, a lower priority than delivering on a big policy agenda. If Obama can achieve that — and anyone who defeated Hillary Clinton in the primaries and won the White House as a black candidate knows something about achieving tough goals — then the scores will have a way of settling themselves.

I guess I’m going through campaign withdrawal, but stumbling on this clip from the end of the campaign (via Mark Bernstein) got me all teary. In four minutes, a perfect oratorical arc, from relaxed storytelling to “Fired up! Ready to go!” With the disasters we face, we’re going to need this sort of inspiration.

“One voice can change a room. And if a voice can change a room, it can change a city. And if it can change a city, it can change a state. And if it can change a state, it can change a nation. And if it can change a nation, it can change the world.”

Okay, we can all exhale now.

For all the Democrats who have spent the last several months not daring to get too overconfident, fearful of some last-minute dirty trick, worrying despite all the evidence that some Karl Rovian demon would spring out of the darkness of the national psyche to trip up our candidate: It’s time to let all that go.

Over the last few weeks, I collected a few links for this moment, which I was confident all along we would arrive at — mementos of naysaying that deserve one last snort before we despatch them to the Web scrapheap.

Here, for instance, is a strange post from the Asia Times by “Spengler”: “McCain will win in November, and by a landslide.”

There was also that refrain of concern that Obama was “not a closer” — first outlined by doubters during the primary season, more recently propounded by Karl Rove to spook the Democrats.

Even more insidious was a high-flown piece by Lee Siegel (of sockpuppetry fame) in the Wall Street Journal, which sang the praises of “the Republicans’ unilateral mastery of the cultural strategy” in the wake of the Palin nomination, under a headline touting the “edge” that “Sarah Palin and the Republicans” had this fall. Siegel also threw in a gratuitous sneer at Obama’s name (“like having a Democratic candidate for president named Pruschev at the height of the Cold War”).

In the Boston Phoenix, my haunt in the ’80s, Steven Stark spun out the masochistic scenario of a last-minute Truman-like turnaround for McCain.

We can put all that behind us now. There, I feel better.

I wrote about why I supported Obama back in February. It seems like eons ago. For me the choice between Obama and McCain is far simpler than the one between Obama and Hillary Clinton was. But the four arguments for Obama that I offered six months ago all still hold:

Pressing the reset button internationally — We need a president who can start over with the rest of the world. It’s obvious.

The “Muslim factor” — the lies about Obama’s religion are a pathetic effort to sway the ignorant. But Obama does have a different understanding of the world thanks to having spent some time as a kid in Indonesia. It will help the U.S. to have a president who actually knows something about Islam.

Electability — “Rather than limiting a Democratic campaign to a desperate hunt for one point over the 50-50 line that has marked Bush-era politics, Obama’s new throngs could tip the election in a stalemate-breaking way,” I wrote in February. Tomorrow we’ll know whether that proves out, as all indications suggest it will.

Positive vibration — “It’s hard to remember any political campaign as relentlessly upbeat as Obama’s, or as unwilling to sling mud.” Though the race certainly got tougher on all sides, I think that judgment still holds. To the extent that Obama has campaigned negatively, he has taken aim largely against the failed policies and record of the GOP, not against the person of John McCain. Like many Democrats, I worried back then whether Obama was “ready to rumble” when the Rovian attacks kicked in. But we were wrong. Obama and his team understood that the sharp counterattacks that please his partisans turn off voters in the undecided middle. He kept his eyes steadily on that prize. It has paid off beautifully in the last six weeks, when he could say, accurately, that he’s talked nonstop about the economy while McCain has talked nonstop about…him.

To these arguments, we can now add one more crucial one that has emerged: the even keel.

People are scared, and have been since the market meltdown in mid-September. They want to elect a president who looks like he’s able to figure out an effective strategy to revive the economy and then apply a steady hand in executing it. Anyone who’s been paying attention to Obama can see such qualities in the way he has run his campaign. McCain’s strategy of the week approach, by contrast, feels erratic and opportunistic. (And that’s not even bringing up Sarah Palin.)

The campaign started with McCain as the choice of voters seeking steadiness and reassurance and Obama looking like something of a gamble on the unknown. But we ended the campaign with the two exactly reversed. Of course other factors have been vital: the Obama campaign’s passionate organizing on the ground, the intelligence and heart of the candidate’s speeches, the astonishingly effective online fundraising from small donors, and the determination to contest the election beyond the old red/blue state lines.

But in the end, I believe Obama will win tomorrow because he is the candidate who has earned voters’ trust: trust that he can begin to solve the nation’s myriad problems; trust that he can begin to unwind the Bush legacy; trust that he can handle whatever comes up.

He is the unlikeliest candidate ever, and he had to go a lot further to earn that trust than his opponent. He has amazed us all by going even further than we dreamed.