Posts Tagged Under ‘Sarah Palin’

President Barack Obama … Unbelievable

… and by a huge victory, at that.

People are chanting “Obama! Obama!”, honking their horns, pounding drums and clapping in unison outside my window in Ann Arbor tonight, and it’s 2:40 a.m. This is louder than any Michigan game and is unlike anything I’ve ever heard. Even when I discount partisanship, the tone feels so much different than the Bush wins of 2000 and 2004 — when I look at the victorious mood I saw back then, it felt that the tone of the celebrations was more, “We won and you didn’t; we proved our ideas right and defeated yours.” Yet today the nature of the happiness seems different, like a huge sense of relief that things really can be what we hoped they could be. Maybe that’s just because it’s been so many years of the other side winning, and so the left side doesn’t know how to gloat; maybe not. But it seems like the difference between a fan who watches his favorite team trounce the visitors versus a guy passing a test that he studied for and still worried he’d fail.

Even up until the last minute, I just didn’t believe Obama would win. It’s not so much that I thought America was racist, but that it was too set in its ways to make such a historic shift in such tumultuous times. People cling to the familiar, I thought. We rally round the known. Yet tonight I saw that so much of the country was so desperate to better things after eight years of the worst un-American leadership it has ever seen that it moved beyond any familiar model and was ready to listen to new ideas.

• The old, heroic American John McCain made a reappearance tonight, just as I thought he would under winning circumstances. That he did so even while losing is a testament to Sen. John McCain. Maybe if he had stayed in his own personality earlier and avoided handing his campaign over to the worst of his party, things would have gone differently. But I don’t know that Republican circumstances could have allowed him to avoid running the campaign he did — there are too many influentials in the Republican Party who continue to bay for liberal blood even after eight years of government dominance, and getting past that obstacle to win the nomination is all but impossible. No matter what the worst of Democratic partisans say, we all saw that McCain never warmed to the ugliest of the attack-dog nastiness that was demanded of him by the party poo-bahs, and that’s why he was ultimately ineffective at it. Perhaps another scored-earth partisan like Bush or the oily Rudy Giuliani would have been able to exploit the nation’s worst attitudes enough to take down Obama, but McCain just seems incapable of that — and that’s a compliment.

  I really did feel a great sadness watching him concede tonight, because the entire nation knew that this was the end for a guy who gave his body and so many years of his life to his country. The fact that McCain never would have been able to run the campaign that he probably wanted to run is what has made me so cynical about our political system, because it chews up positive and pure ideals as the barrier for entry into the public forum. Yet watching McCain return to the Senate to ultimately fade from the scene, even with all of his failings — there’s something sad about it all.

• What will make the victory easier to accept for the nation is that there’s no question of the winner — Obama won not only Ohio, but Florida, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Michigan, New Mexico, Colorado and potentially even Indiana and North Carolina. (As of now.) Seismic, indeed.
• I keep my emotions in check over political events, but I almost teared up watching Jesse Jackson, Oprah and Obama’s other black supporters weeping with joy at the Grant Park rally. My grandpa who emigrated from Ireland greatly admired John F. Kennedy, and in the Irish admiration for Kennedy and the parallel black support for Obama on dispay tonight there’s something really profound: no matter how awful the things history has done to your race or your nationality, with time and human spirit it’s possible to rise above it and get to a better place. Even if it takes generations, it really can be done. To finally get to witness the end triumph is something very special indeed, and no matter your political leanings, that was special to see tonight.
• As I looked at the McCain rally’s audience today, I wondered more than ever just how the Republican party is going to move into the demographics of the 21st century. While Grant Park was a total mishmash, I couldn’t find any non-white faces in all the Arizona crowd shots and panning shots that I saw. No matter what you consider the “real America”, when that America has to share space with demographic reality, you had better find a way to move towards positive integration.
• Sarah Palin will be back for sure. She won’t stay the national joke many would hope she is.
• I’d like to end on one strange political note, and to acknowledge a historical man who has indirectly led to the greatest racial advance this country has ever seen. You probably won’t guess his name.

  He is George W. Bush.

  Bush is that reviled type of historical figure who inherits a bad situation, then complicates it and makes it worse to a degree far beyond its original nature. As the worst president in American history, he has in fact done such a poor job for the nation that many of those older voters in Ohio or Virginia who would have otherwise been far too focused on Obama’s race likely said to themselves today, “Race used to be a directly negative factor in a politician, but after the incompetence this country has endured in the past eight years and how angry it has made me, I will vote for anybody the opposition party can offer who represents a break from the present situation.” Obama has a funny name, he’s not white, and he has liberal ideas, but he is something new and became a vessel for hope about a different and better future. That won him the election tonight, and strangely George W. Bush did a lot to open the door.

The Pat Take on the Debate

I, too, enjoyed the finery of verbal evasion and interpersonal sniping that was the inaugural 2008 U.S. presidential debate. Let’s rock some stuff:

• First off, name-dropping: some MBA section friends and I tried to watch the debate at a local A2 watering hole, only to have our peaceful watching interrupted by a hard-partying Michael Phelps and his XL crew of groupies. And yes, that is 100% true. We had to bail and watch the thing on DVR at a friend’s house.
• Notable tonight was the near-complete absence of God talk. Nobody mentioned The Creator, or God’s will for the U.S., and they particularly stayed away from God’s perspective on the Iraq troop surge. Perhaps this just reflects both candidates’ personal approach to religion, but I noted how much it differed from the 2000 and 2004 debates. I guarantee, 9,000%, that Palin will break this newly identified trend within the first ten minutes of the VP debate.
• The following are directly pertinent truths that clearly could not have been spoken by either candidate:
  1. The government budget is so high because defense spending is completely out of control. (McCain, to his credit, sorta addressed this. Only he can pull that off, what with the POW hell-on-Earth thing and all.) Earmarks don’t matter for 1/100th of a damn. If you really want to save government money, take the Air Force and fold it back into the Army. Seriously, they are a huge waste of cash.
  2. A nuclear-armed Iran is probably unavoidable at this stage, but that doesn’t in the slightest mean Israel is going to die. Is anybody really discussing a conventional military invasion of Iran at this point in time, even before they have nuclear weapons? Because with Ali Khameini’s interest in regime self-preservation (props to Obama for finally identifying on a national political stage that Ahmedinedjad has very little real power in Iran), the likelihood of a nuclear first strike on Israel is next to zero. If you want to take it to a level that’s really beyond the pale in politically concerned discussion, a nuclear Iran and subsequent Arab arms race could actually promote regional stability through the reduced threat of conventional war.
     
     Discuss. Or in keeping with political reality, don’t.
  3. The United States — though a permanent fixture on the world stage due to its huge geographic area, natural resources and very large population — is no longer a world-bestriding colossus and needs to find its real friends fast. We don’t know who the candidates think these countries are, because like I said, declining U.S. power and influence is an unspeakable political reality. (Not that I fault Jim Lehrer for not asking — Jim, you’re great, on the serious for real. I met you at that D.C. book party that one time, plus I find it hella cool that you were a Marine and are an awesome, truly objective, non-airhead throwback, so I’m permanently on your side. Please don’t retire, ever.)
• I will never get enough of that “You son of a bitch, I cannot believe you just said that, if it weren’t for all these cameras I’d tear out your throat” smile that the candidates inevitably make.
• Does Barack Obama lose voter points for his correct pronunciation of “Pakistan” vs. McCain’s Americanized version? (And I guarantee McCain knows that it’s “Pock-ee-STAHN” instead of “PACK-i-stan”.) Survey says: points deduction — speak like a ‘Mercan!
• I can’t watch Rudy Giuliani these days without wanting to punch him hard in the mouth. I thought Americans were supposed to hate disdain, and then the Republican party keeps airing this guy who’s just sopping with sarcastic condescension. For real, has there ever been a national political figure as condescending as Giuliani? He’s really crossed some kind of jagoff Rubicon. Good for Giuliani, I guess: he wins at being a slime-oozing hyena. Hooray for the G man.
• All of this debate stuff matters very little, but it’s always fascinating to watch the national discourse try to enshrine the opposite. For instance, I know very few people who would change their vote because one candidate sighed too many times, and yet it has become an article of fact that Al Gore’s sighing was a major factor in his defeat. Nor have I ever seen a presidential debate that involved as much complete ownage as John Kerry’s verbal dismemberment of George W. Bush in the first debate of 2004, and yet we all know how well that worked out for Kerry. Look for some very minor facet of this debate to become a future “turning point” for whoever is elected.
• Do I have a winner? If I’m writing as me, no — they both made some good and unexpected points and hit the essentials effectively. (One Obama supporter with whom I watched the debate lamented that McCain “kicked his ass.” Eh, not really.) If I’m writing as Joe Average, then I think McCain had a slight edge. As Joe Average, I care about the election, but I just don’t have time for all of Barack Obama’s explanations and clarifications. Plus, dude talked more than once about plans that “might work, or they might not.” What? Certainty is the key here, homes, whether the outcome is certain or not.
• McCain tonight reminded me that I really don’t dislike McCain the dude that much. As a matter of fact, under normal circumstances, I think he’d be an OK president. But then he went way beyond acceptability with the Palin pick, and I’ve lost a ton of respect for him after watching her repeatedly demonstrate just how far out of her league she really is. I know he wants to win, but picking someone so dangerously clueless to be the second in command of the United States of America is the complete opposite of all that “country first” stuff he’s spouting. What happened, yo? McCain better have agonized over the soul sale involved in making such a ridiculous and dangerous sop to the political base. I hope he fills us in some day in the memoirs, because a potentially juicy memoir read is the only good thing about that pick.
• That’ll clearly become more important in the future, because I’ve thought for months that a McCain victory is inevitable. I’m sorry, fellow lefties, and while you really never know, I do think McCain has this one locked up. Like I said, I’d mostly be OK with President John McCain, but then you run into this very real possibility: “Ladies and gentlemen, The President of the United States, Sarah Palin.”

  Oh, snap. Please, nation: prove me wrong.

Yo

Recent things:

• I believe that even if I supported anything about Sarah Palin, I’d still be really sick of seeing her everywhere I turn. Conservatives would compare Palin’s star power to Obama, but Obama’s ascent took a good two years and wasn’t compressed into a two-week news cycle. He’s also one of the two people actually running for president.
• Another Palin-borne irony: after years of ignorant sports commentators decrying hockey as “not a real sport”, it’s now somehow true that being peripherally involved with organized hockey (even at the little-kid level) is considered a solid qualification for the Presidency of the United States. The NHL’s marketing department needs to jump on this with the quickness.
• Part of the reason I was excited to get to the University of Michigan this year was the chance to go to a school with a real football program. Nevermind my conflicted loyalties from being born in Columbus and having attending another Big Ten school; this was supposed to be my chance to claim a piece of the action as the Wolverines crushed all opponents. Instead I get games like this, this and also this (which, though a win, was most unimpressive.)

  Northwestern, meanwhile, is 3-0.

  Bastards.

• While searching for a sound effect that would convey Michigan football’s limpness, I did manage to get seriously geeked from this:

  ↑ ↑ ↓ ↓ ← → ← → B A what.

• Congrats to my cousin Dante and his wife Kari on their new son (and, simultaneously, their anniversary), who was born just this morning and is the first of the new generation in my family. Pitt, you just gained another fan.