Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock or living in a cave for the past ~24 hours, Senator Barack Obama is now President-Elect Obama! Politically, I view myself as a left-leaning moderate (or a moderately left?) so I’m happy with the election results.
Surprisingly, however, I’m not as ecstatic about having a Democrat in the White House as I thought I would be. I read Senator John McCain’s biography yesterday and started feel really bad for him. I really started to understand the scope of his service to the country, in the military and in the Senate. While I don’t necessarily agree with his politics (nor those of his runningmate Sarah Palin, who really alienated a lot of people), I felt increasingly bad for him as the night wore on. It almost got to a point where I would have reconsidered my vote. Almost. But then I read his foreign policies again and I felt at ease with my decision.
It’s a shame he didn’t win the nomination in 2000; He would’ve done MUCH better than President Bush #2. But with the state of our country and President Bush’s fallout didn’t give him much of a chance, so Commander-in-Chief won’t be added to his distinguished list of service.
On a related tangent, I’ve been reading reports of 97% of African-Americans voting for Obama. I naively HOPE that they voted for Obama based on his vision and proposed policies, not just because they share a similar tone of skin color. I wonder, if instead of Obama a white man with the exact same credentials, ideas and vision ran against McCain, how the results would have compared. Basically, I feel like race was the big white elephant in the room. Everybody was scared to be labeled a racist, so the race issue was downplayed, but in the end, I feel that his ethnic makeup really turned the election into the landslide it was.
After having a day to soak in the media following Obama’s victory, I kept hearing from African-Americans being interviewed, ‘I’ve never been so proud to be an American!!‘ or worse, ‘I can finally be proud to be American!!‘ Why is it only because a black man reached the highest office in the United States makes them proud? While our reputation in the world for the past 8 years has made it hard to have American pride, it just really bothers me now that the only reason some people are proud is because a black man was elected.
Honestly, it’s really hard for me to put my feelings on this matter into words, but hopefully you get the gist of it.
I feel like I’m incomprehensibly rambling now, so I’ll just cut this short right here. Let me know what you think!
I think that McCain wanted to be a different candidate from the one he became. Him being a Republican that had a pro-choice stance and generally being socially liberal failed to energize his would be base. That’s the reason he took a hard swing to the right, and I think it was really evident after picking up Palin.
But what really put the nail in the coffin for McCain was the economy. He was fundamentally wrong about the economy, and he was irresponsibly wrong about it. Do we really believe that he meant that the American worker was hard working?
I used to like McCain more, but this article shed a lot of light on him for me: http://www.rollingstone.com/news/coverstory/make_believe_maverick_the_real_john_mccain
I don’t think race was an elephant in the room. People can talk freely about race without being racist, unless they are being racist. Also, in the beginning of Obama’s campaign, I think a popular sentiment in the black community was of dismissal. Given the history of Black Americans in this country I’m not surprised they voted the way they did. Minorities naturally have more solidarity than majorities. Though I hope that everyone can vote objectively, the reality is that most people across all demographics aren’t even cognizant of the factors that make them vote the way they do.
That being said, I’m glad Obama won and I hope that his administration will reflect the message his campaign has been running. If he can stay grounded amid the historic nature of the election, which I think he can, I think he will be able to demonstrate those qualities. I think his speech Tuesday night reflected the sobriety he has entering the office.
Wow, that article is a real eye opener about McCain…between is own accounts and the article, I’m sure the truth lies somewhere in-between.