|
Edited on Wed Nov-05-08 01:36 AM by Plaid Adder
Man, I'm still waiting for it to sink in. It's so WEIRD for an election to be OVER on election night!
Yesterday I posted saying I was sick and wouldn't be around much today. Well, today I felt better; but my partner is coming down with whatever it was that I had. So she didn't get down to Indianapolis after all to do GOTV; but as it turns out it didn't matter because Indiana or no Indiana it was a @#$! LANDSLIDE. I was well enough to go vote, though.
Anyway...so tonight, my partner was in the bedroom resting up, and I had a lot of work to catch up on, having been out sick, so I was doing it with the TV sound off, glancing up now and then whenever I heard a screech of elation break out from the election party going on across the street. (We live pretty close to Obama's house. People are kind of excited.) The first outbreak of glee was when they called Ohio for Obama, which I duly ran and reported. "He's won both Ohio and Pennsylvania!" I said. "What about Florida?" said my partner, groggily. "I don't know!" So I got her some more Gatorade and went back out to the TV.
The counter was stuck at 207 for a while, so I stopped paying attention. Then I heard another burst of screaming, looked up at the screen, and ran down to get my partner.
I said, "He's up to 288! I don't know how!"
We ran back down to the TV. We were watching ABC, and they weren't calling it yet. At some point my partner observed that it was sort of stupid for them to not be projecting the winner when they were projecting 288 votes in Obama's column. I said, "But he has to get to 290." She said, "No, he has to get to 270." I went, shit, she's right. OH MY GOD! HE WON!!
Here's the thing. I've seen that 270 number thrown around here all day every day for weeks on end, and yet, when I saw that 288 number, my brain just adjusted the target up. Because God knows, my brain was thinking, we can't actually be WINNING.
But then McCain conceded. And I had to face the fact that in fact, it looked like we had won.
It was a good concession speech. It was, of course, interrupted by boos from his supporters, who apparently don't value graciousness. It must be sad to be McCain right now, knowing that he sold himself to the devil--I'm sorry, to Rove's minions--and all for the chance to not only lose by a landslide but to give his moral high ground speech to an audience of people clearly incapable of appreciating it. But at least he didn't try to drag it out by whining about Acorn.
So we waited, and the numbers kept going up, and finally we watched Obama's speech from Grant Park. And as soon as he came out and started into it, I thought, "Damn, he looks really tired. And he doesn't really look that happy."
Pretty early into the speech he mentioned his grandmother. And then I remembered: oh yeah. His grandmother just died. Of course he doesn't look happy.
And as he got further into the speech, and he started talking about what lies ahead, I thought about what this unexpectedly grave acceptance speech really meant. It's not just that it brought home to me something that I've seen Obama supporters talk about a lot here--the fact that unlike many politicians we could name on both sides of the aisle, Obama seems to have preserved the human being within the shell of the politician's exterior. I've been skeptical of that claim for a long time because I can tell how slick that exterior is and I can see the work that goes into it. But I am starting to come around to it tonight. Not just because you can see--at least I could see--him integrating his personal sense of loss into his performance of this extremely public moment. I think that what I was very, very surprised to be looking at--and surprised mainly because of the 8 years I've spent staring at the train wreck engineered by the Bush/Cheney/Rove axis--was a politician who knows that winning the race is not the point. The point is to do the job, and to do it well. And Obama has defined some pretty ambitious parameters for what his 'job' as president really is. And he must be feeling the weight of all that coming down on him now. And he understands that this is not the beginning of one long party for him and his buddies, but the beginning of a difficult, dangerous, and terribly important mission that will shape the destinies of millions of people here and elsewhere.
One of the things that has maddened me most about Bush was my conviction that he never for one instant of his life understood how serious his responsibilities were, or cared what consequences his actions had. For Bush, it was all about him--his glory, his power, his ability to order up a grilled cheese sandwich from the White House chef at any time of the day or night, his own crazy blood-spilling havoc-wreaking insane plans for how to make himself the savior of the universe. And that is why, as I thought about it, I decided I was glad that Obama didn't seem to have his party face on tonight. Because it shows that he knows that what he does in the next four years is going to matter a lot more than what happened tonight. And he's got to know that he's taking over a country that's in really, REALLY bad shape.
In the Vatican, apparently, there is a room called the Room of Tears. It's where the new popes go to be alone for a while after they've been invested. It is so called because the typical response to being given that responsibility is apparently to break down and cry. I don't know whether the Presidential suite at the Hyatt has a Room of Tears, but I kind of have the feeling that that's where Obama was while he was in the wings waiting to come out to give the speech of his lifetime. I personally don't think it was the best speech he's ever given, as the pundits seem to be saying. But I actually think that's a good sign. The time for political theater is over. The words are still going to matter. But from now on in, it's really about what gets done.
It's important for us, on our smaller scale, to feel the same tears and to make the same transition. We're the party in power now. We've finally got the executive branch back. We have to start thinking not about how to resist power but about how to use it. We have to start thinking about how to prevent our own desires to see our erstwhile overlords dragged through the mud from getting in the way of the work that needs to be done. We have to start seeing ourselves as the ones who are responsible for what happens next, who have been given the charge of making the country and the planet better. The best part of that speech tonight was Obama's call for us to do that. I gotta start thinking about how our family's gonna answer that.
In addition to all that, of course, there is the extra weight of the 400 years of history that Obama's election will change. Others are talking about that better than I can tonight, but I want to say that despite what the media will tell you, Obama's election does not mean that racism is dead in this country. I don't believe that and I certainly don't think Obama believes it. He's got to know that all the people who voted for him did it because they trusted him to make this country a better place for them--and he's got to know how hard that's going to be. He's also got to know that he will have to be at least twice as successful to be thought half as good, and that there will be sharks all around him, all the time, waiting for the taste of blood. And it's just as well that he feels the gravity of that, too.
PJ slept through it all, of course. But she'll wake up in a different world. I do wonder what it will be like for her, the future she will live into, unencumbered by the 38 years we've been dragging around. Maybe she'll be able to be better than we are, to do better things, to take better care of the world, because of what's happened tonight. And thinking about that does kind of make me cry.
To everyone at DU who worked so hard to get us out of this nightmare and into this other history, thank you. Congratulations on winning the first fight of many. I have always been glad to be with you guys, through the bad times and the yet even more awful times. I will value you guys even more in the better times that I hope are coming. In the 8 years since DU was founded, we've all been through the war. Let's hope to God this is the beginning of the end of it.
Yes we have and yes we will,
The Plaid Adder
|
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
