ELECTION 2008-RANDOM THOUGHTS AND TAKEAWAYS

“The child is father of the man.” William Wordsworth

Something for Everyone

After last night, even the most intractable, militant—and now horrified—Obama opponents have no choice: they must stop and reflect. (That’s all we ever asked of them.)

If their mental satellite dishes are plugged in and able to receive signals in this radically altered atmosphere, they may locate a few encouraging pings.

The American Dream

Obama’s win is a quintessential American success story. He’s the human embodiment of the melting pot. He’s transformed self-esteem (yes, ego and ambition play a part) and determination into self-determination. His extended family, his organization, and his voters mirror that.

For those who still experience visceral recoil at this idea, that’s the straight, not-at-all-new, deal. Wrought in direct descent from the Founding Fathers’ clearly articulated, idealized—albeit selective—vision.

Our tent, always intended in words (if not deeds) to be expandable and welcoming, has by God proven to be just so.

African-Americans

For us, this election represents some tough-love messages for African-Americans. Messages that conservatives can cozy up to.

Jesse Jackson, weeping last night at the import of the moment, has tried for years, but the messages got lost in the packaging (all rhyme, no climb):

• No more excuses. Yes, it’s harder to be black in America, but not as hard as it was before yesterday.
• Particularly for the disenchanted and disconnected African American male adult, time to challenge the understandable but deathly bankrupt definitions of courage and manliness. Time to man up.
• The path to success in America is through hard work, education, and assimilation. Honor your own ethnic identity, but work the system, beat them at their own game. And for that, you will be—perhaps grudgingly, perhaps warmly, but in any case inevitably—respected and embraced. “Talking white” and “acting white” viewed as not so much an insult as a success model.

Dare we hope, perhaps, for the beginning of the end for the hip-hop “culture”?

The GOP

Time to rethink and reinvent.

You guys had this election all wrong from the beginning, and got a well-deserved spanking.

This election took place in a different world than 2000. You guys missed the point. You marched in place, the world kept on going. While you fixated on and fiddled with the crusty allure of your own ideology infested navels, the balance of global wealth and power shifted and moved the cheese.

You showed your arthritic hand at the convention, when Giuliani literally scoffed at Obama’s experience as a community organizer. Then Rudy and the rest of you got to watch flat-footed as Obama assembled and organized a nationwide community of the modest that ran rings around you all-knowing, seasoned pros.

He’s using e-mail, you’re using hate mail.

You now have the opportunity to get fixed and get right.

McCain Never Had a Chance

McCain never had a chance. His task was impossible: to somehow distance himself from, and at the same time tie himself to, the disgraced GOP junta, embrace those he’d once maverick-ishly offended, and still follow the “tried and true” Bush/Karl Rove/GOP election roadmap: tired tag lines, appeals to fear, unconscionable tricks, and nut jobs to the far right. Folks who could support bombing an abortion clinic, executing a convict, poisoning the environment, taking health care away from children, and then argue pro-life.

• McCain sought to skewer Obama on his questionable associations, but in order to get elected, willingly (even if not gladly) shared his table with shameless cheaters and unconscious haters.
• He spoke against elitists and wasteful “pork,” but his staff flew around the country spending $150,000 on clothes for Palin that would never be worn.
• He made experience a central campaign issue up until 6:00 PM EST yesterday, but picked a running mate who, as attractive and intriguing as she may be, is better qualified to host a talk show (we’ve got a title: “Just Plain Palin”) than run for national office. Palin didn’t go rogue, she went rouge.
• Intending to praise Obama as a decent family man, he slurred Muslims.

McCain, in his last-chance lust for the prize, sold out. He was compelled to do what he condemned in others, and then try to rename it as something else. This was nothing like the change he promised: it was classic GOP.

But McCain really did have few options; he had to try to put lipstick on this pig.

McCain and Cheney – The Final Nail?

At the eleventh hour, Dick Cheney endorsed McCain. Read that again, slowly.

There is but one reasonable explanation for both the endorsement and its timing, since it could only further wound McCain’s glimmering chances: Cheney must dislike McCain very intensely. He’d skulked in the weeds, salivating at the chance to pay McCain back—for something.

McCain cannot have welcomed the endorsement, but was apparently powerless to do anything to muzzle it. If he could, wouldn’t he have told Cheney “thanks, but keep it under your hat”?

After all, Dick Cheney’s indelible legacy is as the sneering poster curmudgeon for arrogant, insensitive, unintelligent, unwise, feckless, out-of-touch conservative power liberally misapplied in service of misguided ideology. There is blood on Cheney’s hands (insert hunting joke here). McCain could not have willingly let Cheney wipe some off onto him.

Cheney shot down, with finality, McCain’s lathered and laborious flight away from George Bush.

For McCain, Tragedy and Irony

We feel sorrow for John McCain. He wanted this so badly, he broke faith with his hard-earned reputation. The real John McCain—the one we liked and admired and would have voted for—didn’t emerge until last night’s concession speech.

It’s extraordinary, admirable that he survived a North Vietnamese prison camp, but this is not a job qualification (really, what had he run)? The enduring tragedy (chronicled in several previous HCO posts)—and for those who practice schadenfreude, the enduring irony—is that McCain may find himself a tortured prisoner of this election, his own poorly conceived and miserably executed war.

We hope he doesn’t and his resilience wins out. We need him.

Jesse Jackson

Jesse Jackson stood in Grant Park, weeping. Not stage center, but one face in a galvanized rainbow gathering.

Like him or hate him (we're not fans), we are nevertheless in his debt. He helped to shoulder the door open; he was the first to motivate credible people to put the words “African-American” and “President” into the same sentence.

If thoughts and words are the progenitors of deeds, Obama stands on his shoulders.

Lenses and Lessons

• To those who continue to rail and would resist the new reality: look at the electoral map. This election did not resemble 2000 when Bush beat Gore (by the width of a boar’s hair, if at all); Obama’s support did not depend solely on the overpopulated slivers hugging the coasts. This election was more tectonic than episodic, a national referendum on an obsolete mindset. Eight years ago, we looked at the map and concluded that WE were out of touch, out of the main stream. Your turn.
• Karl Rove (and disciples) had as much effect on this election as Karl Marx.
• As Forrest Gump said, “Stupid is as stupid does.” This election was a triumph of sense over nonsense, the articulate over the stupefied: you can’t sell something you don’t believe in yourself.
• Genuine leadership requires intelligence, cognitive and emotional. Peripheral vision, knowing what you don’t know, surrounding yourself with sages rather than sycophants.
• When anyone claims to “know” something or “know” everything, suspect the opposite.

What We’d Like to See

Obama borrowing from Lincoln, and hiring his opponents. How about McCain as Secretary of Defense? Powell or Rice as Secretary of State? Hillary Clinton as something?

Parting Words

William Wordsworth, a romantic poet, wrote, “The child is father of the man.” Here’s the whole poem:

My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my
life began,
So is it now I am a man,
So be it when I shall grow old
Or let me die!
The child is father of the man:
And I could wish my
days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.

Our children, who we teach right from wrong, have taught us. They’ve grown up in a more diverse world, have over time begun to drop many of the artificial barriers that divide, and held us to our own words.

They helped us fight our own flawed programming to chide the arrogant and the ignorant, and relegate them to bitter sniping from the back bench over their ruined regime.

Last night in Grant Park, Obama stood. Subdued, not elated. Humbled by the accomplishment, processing the implications.

Like the Wordsworth poem, he’d spoken of idealized, romantic aspirations, he’d inspired and motivated, and then at the very moment when he might have been justified to revel, to gloat, he remained constant, tethered to reality.

Later on, we may discover that Obama was neither Mr. Right nor Mr. Right Now. But he is clearly Mr. Right for Right Now.