Obama Wins and Redefines Real America

[babylonsister]

http://blogs.cqpolitics.com/davidcorn/2008/11/obama-wins-and-redefines-real.html

Obama Wins and Redefines Real America

By David Corn | November 5, 2008


So who's a real American now?

With his decisive triumph over Senator John McCain, Senate Barack Obama made obvious history: he is the first black (or biracial) man to win the presidency. But the meaning of his victory--in which Obama splashed blue across previously red states--extends far beyond its racial significance. Obama, a former community organizer and law professor, won the White House as one of the most progressive (or liberal) nominees in the Democratic Party's recent history. Mounting one of the best run presidential bids in decades, Obama tied his support for progressive positions (taxing the wealthy to pay for tax cuts for working Americans, addressing global warming, expanding affordable health insurance, withdrawing troops from Iraq) to calls for cleaning up Washington and for crafting a new type of politics. Charismatic, steady, and confident, he melded substance and style into a winning mix that could be summed up in simple and basic terms: hope and change.

snip//

Obama wasn't just taking on Bushism. He was taking on Reaganism.

McCain, Palin, and their supporters did make it personal. They claimed that Obama was misleading the voters, that he was not what he seemed. They argued that he was not up to the job. The McCain-Palin campaign ran a series of ads--one falsely asserted that Obama had supported teaching kindergartners "comprehensive sex education"--that various MSM outlets pronounced untruthful and unfair. The Straight Talk Express was derided as a cavalcade of misrepresentation. The McCain-Palin campaign revived the Bill Ayers attack. It tried to brand Obama an associate of anti-Semites, pointing to his relationship with a Palestinian scholar--without producing evidence that this Palestinian was anti-Semitic. (The International Republican Institute, a group chaired by McCain, had given over $400,000 to a group co-founded by this scholar.)

It was an ugly assault. Speaking in support of McCain and Palin, Representative Robin Hayes (R-NC) declared, "Liberals hate real Americans that work, and accomplish, and achieve, and believe in God." McCain supporters referred to Obama as "Barack Hussein Obama." At a Palin rally, Representative Steve King (R-IA) said that an Obama victory would cause the United States to turn into a "totalitarian dictatorship." Representative Michele Bachmann (R-MN) declared that Obama was "anti-American." While she was at it, she urged the media to investigate and root out anti-Americanism within the US Congress.

This mud did not stick. Perhaps worse for McCain, his camp never presented a coherent strategic argument for its candidate. Obama had change and hope. McCain had no real case for McCain--other than he was a POW who put his country first. What did he want to do as president? Serve his country again. He essentially asked to be rewarded for his past service and sacrifice. He didn't feel the voters' pain; he wanted them to feel his. And his campaign ended up being defined mostly by its retro attack on Obama: he's an untested and untrustworthy liberal.

Most of the voters disagreed.

With his victory, Obama has ended the Bush II era with an exclamation point. (The Democratic gains in Congress seconded the point.) Now Obama faces a restoration project of unprecedented proportions. It may take years for him and the rest of Washington to remedy the ills neglected, exacerbated or caused by the Bush presidency. And he will have a tough time matching progress to promise. At his victory celebration in Chicago before tens of thousands, he lowered expectations: "the road ahead will be long. The climb ahead will be steep." And he noted that his electoral victory merely provided "only the chance for us to make that change."

But his barrier-breaking victory was indeed change in itself. Consider this: Obama ended his campaign at a rally on Monday night in Manassas, Virginia, the site of Battle of Bull Run, the opening land battle of the Civil War, in which Union troops were routed and forced to retreat back to Washington, DC There before a crowd of 90,000--young, old, black, white, affluent, working-class--Obama summed up his case:

Tomorrow, you can turn the page on policies that have put greed and irresponsibility before hard work and sacrifice. Tomorrow, you can choose policies that invest in our middle class and create new jobs, grow this economy so everybody has a chance to succeed, not just the CEO but the secretary and the janitor, not just the factory owner but the men and women who work the factory floors. And tomorrow, you can end to the politics that would divide a nation just to win an election, that pits region against region, city against town, Republican against Democrat, that asks us to fear at a time when we need to hope.

A black man on the verge of being elected president said that.

But race is just one part of the tale. Obama has done more than become a first. He has redrawn the electoral map (take that, Karl Rove) and reshaped the political culture of the United States. He has transformed the image of the United States--abroad and at home. (He vowed in Chicago that "a new dawn of American leadership is at hand.") Above all, after eight troubling years and after decades of ideological civil war, Obama has redefined what is real America. "Who knew that we were the Silent Majority?" his press secretary Linda Douglass said moments after Obama left the stage in Grant Park.

The voters who see President-elect Obama as the embodiment of their America can trade the Yes We Can motto for a new one: Yes We Are.

[Barack_Obama]

1. Palin responds...

"You betcha!"

[JohnWxy]

2. lacking any real ideas of their own, (what they propose are just arguments concocted to counter

ideas and policies proposed by Democrats) they must resort to their most genuine response to anyone's efforts to achieve constructive changes (to improve the lot of everyone) they do what they are so good at - gutter politics - fear and hate mongering. Use of insinuation and outright lies to attack their opponents through invented or imagined charges of impropriety or wrong-doing. (impropriety is better because, if there was supposed to be actual wrong-doing they could be asked "why don't you bring formal charges if what you say is true?")

Yes, slime-ball politics, that's what Republicans are masters of. Democrats are no good at it as they don't have the stomach for it (thankfully. What if ALL politicians were Republicans. You know where we would be then - in HELL!)