November 17th, 2008 by Hoopleton

It’s two months till Inauguration Day, which means the honeymoon is over and it’s time to look at what we need to expect from our President-elect. So, for your cynical pleasure, I offer this short list of things that we and Barack Obama need to do in the many days to come.

1. Obama needs to deliver change. Rhetoric, even soaring rhetoric is one thing, but what this nation truly needs is real change. We live at a time of several converging emergencies. Two mismanaged wars, an economic system in collapse, the worst energy crisis in thirty years, healthcare in massive need of reform, a deficit out of control, the greatest environmental disaster in our entire history. And you thought being President was easy. Can Barack Obama solve all of our woes in four years or even in eight? Probably not, but he can get things moving in the right direction, but to do so he needs to truly shake up the system. Throughout his political career the Senator from Illinois has played it safe, but in these times there’s just no room for stepping lightly. Obama needs to challenge power, set fires, tear down fences. Or to put it in other words, speak loudly and carry a very big stick.

2. Accountability is job one. The new President will need our support if he is to tackle the torrent of issues that threaten this nation and its people, but he will also need our criticism. Just like the majority of Americans I was ecstatic on Election Day, I’m proud of the choice we’ve made, but even though I like Obama (I may or may not have a poster of him on my wall), I will not back away from keeping him honest. The President-elect promised the people a transparent, reasonable and uniting government, none of us should be afraid of calling him out if he doesn’t deliver. He is our President after all, we gave him the job. Besides, let’s not repeat the blind fanaticism of the last eight years. Politicians are lying pieces of shit, let’s make sure Barack doesn’t become one.

3. The revolution cannot be stage-managed. One of the reasons why Barack Obama ran such an impressive campaign was because he and his staff micromanaged every event with the media spotlight in mind. Huge open-air rallies, prime time infomercials, mock Presidential seals. Made for TV theatrics are great if you want to build hype, but Obama needs to be more than that, he needs to be substance. With the challenges we face there will be plenty of unscripted moments. There will be plenty of things that seem to come from left field. Do I hear the phone ringing at 3am? If the moment calls for immediate response, if the challenges and choices that must be made may prove unpopular at the moment the new President must never hesitate. Again we go back to Obama’s habit of playing it safe. The obsession with image. This is it, Barack. You won. So now what are you really going to do? We’re waiting. We’re hoping. And we want the real thing, no matter how ugly it may be.

4. Don’t be Bill Clinton. The biggest tragedy of Bill Clinton’s presidency was that he worked everyday thinking about the next election cycle. Instead of really doing anything substantial he sat on his hands for eight years and let the economic prosperity of the 1990s propel him to fame. Then he had sex with an intern and gave the White House to George W. Bush. I seriously doubt Obama would be stupid enough to get himself caught up in a cheating scandal, and he certainly doesn’t have the luxury of an economic boom to let him off the hook of actually governing, but that doesn’t mean he won’t spend his time trying to hold onto power and doing as little as he possibly can. When FDR came into the White House he faced a mountain of crises and just like Obama found himself with a Democratic Congress and a people desperate for leadership. Instead of just sitting around (well, actually he was in a wheelchair so technically all he did was sit around), FDR jumped out of the gate (again, figuratively) with a full agenda of new programs and legislative reforms. In the end the man who led America through the Second World War did more in the first one hundred days of his Presidency than someone like Bill Clinton did in eight years. Obama needs to follow that same example. He needs to be FDR.

5. Don’t be George W. Bush. All right, granted, to be George W. Bush, Obama would probably need a full lobotomy or at the very least several blows to the head, but I’m concerned with one particular issue: actually be a uniter, not a divider. Number forty-three promised this nation a unified government and instead what we’ve had for the past eight years is the most vile form of partisan wrangling in recent times. Obama has now promised us the same thing, a UNITED States of America. So, how does he do it? I think Hillary Clinton is actually a really solid choice for Secretary of State (something I will write about more if she actually does take the job), but for the Obama Presidency to really make new ground it needs to bring in some Republicans as well (though please, for the love of God, keep them out of the Treasury). How about John McCain for Homeland Defense? What I’d really like to see is Obama reach into the fringes as well. Why not? How about Ralph Nader for Commerce? The point is that this can’t be a 100% Democratic voyage, others need to be heard. Embrace John F. Kennedy as your role model, bring in the smartest people from across the land, even if you disagree with everything they say. If not, you risk floating in a bubble of your own making, just like George W. Bush. Sure in that bubble the people love you, everyone thinks your super smart and no one has a problem with the way you pronounce “nuclear,” but the rest of us need you out here.

6. Don’t be a martyr. This one may seem trivial. This one may seem in bad taste, but I’m being serious here. Yes, drive in the armor reinforced limousine. No, never go anywhere that isn’t completely secure. Yes, avoiding pissing off the CIA, Mafia and a ragtag collection of Cuban exiles all at the same time. No, do not go to the theater. Ever. The sad lesson of America, and really of World History, is that the good guys die and the assholes tend to live forever. Sure, Hitler killed himself, but Stalin, Pol Pot, Nixon and a whole array of other bastards just kept going and going. And yea, it’s great to be remembered and idealized forever, but lets face facts, a living breathing Gandhi, MLK, JFK, RFK, John Lennon and Malcolm X (and these guys are just the top of a very big iceberg) would’ve been better for us than the symbols of martyrdom that they became. Be safe Barack. Stay with us and do good. As Bob Marley once said after being shot, the bad guys never take a day off, neither should we.

November 6th, 2008 by Hoopleton

In many ways the road ahead for President Obama is steep, the expectations enormous, the weight of history so heavy that there seems to be few places to go but down.  I plan to tackle the challenges for Obama and for us, the viewing public, in the days to come, but for now I want to exam the reasons he won. Let’s not kid ourselves, in many ways this election was for the Democrats to lose, but a combination of luck, superb campaigning and the failures of the Republican side made November 4th nearly inevitable.

So, in the spirit of making order out of the chaos, I offer this short list of why John McCain lost and Barack Obama won.

1. Bush. Unless you are some xenophobic, delusional idiot with his head up his own ass, you probably agree that George W. Bush has proven himself consistently to be one of the worst choices for President in this nation’s history (the question of whether he actually won both of his elections I leave for you to decide). Two wars (both of which have turned into fiascos), a freefall economy, an enormous national debt, a tarnished American image (to put it mildly), a demoralized voting public, lies, scandal and cronyism of the worst kind, corporatism of the highest order, and massive stupidity have made the last eight years a living hell. Everything that number forty-three has touched has turned to shit, including the once proud party of Ronald Reagan (not that I’m a fan of Reagan, but at least he was halfway competent). But hey, what do you expect from a frat boy with daddy issues? Swimming against the stream of the Bush/Cheney years hit John McCain hard from the start, because it seems Americans tend to hold accountable the party in power for the horrendous mistakes they’ve made. And thank God for that. In many ways Bush defeated McCain in this year’s election much as he did in 2000. The old maverick never stood a chance.

2. Palin. McCain’s worst personal trait is that he’s willing to do anything to win, including selling out his own principals. This led him to adopt Bush strategies and pick as his running mate Governor Sarah Palin. The former beauty queen, turned near fascist social conservative attack dog came out of the gate and energized the Republican base (or as I call it, the crazies). The only problem was that as the American electorate got to know her, she scared the shit out of everyone else. The tragically overambitious woman who had no idea what the Vice President actually did, believed in banning abortion in all cases including rape and incest, forced rape victims in the town of Wasilla to pay for their own rape kits, thought that living in a state bordering Russia gave her foreign affairs experience, and completely undercut the Republican argument against Obama’s lack of experience, nearly immediately devolved into a frightening national joke (one she didn’t get). What Palin did for McCain was that she made his age an even larger factor in the election, but the choice also tied him to the extreme Right wing. If the self described maverick had actually chosen a moderate Republican or even a former Democrat (as he had wanted to do) he could have played to the center and maybe had a real shot at the highest office in the land. Tragically, all he accomplished was to make Sarah Palin a household name, and the new standard bearer for the forces of intolerance. No, we haven’t seen the last of her.

3. Tone. In a time in American history when people crave change it’s stupid to push a constant torrent of negative attacks. Yes, Obama did it too, but the problem was that McCain and Palin did little else. The entire tone of the Republican campaign was that of fear of the other. McCain rallies in the last weeks of the election cycle turned into glorified lynch mobs where all that is worst about America came into full light. Screams of “terrorist” and “kill him” could be heard during campaign events. Uneducated whites ignorantly declared that they would never vote for a Muslim. Bill Ayers, ACORN, socialism, radical, became keywords in the Republican message. McCain’s campaign became that of fear and only fear, especially when mixed with the Arizona Senator’s tendency to come off as angry, dismissive and deeply out of touch in every debate and most of his public appearances. But perhaps the worst mistake of the McCain campaign was to attack Obama’s record as a community organizer, essentially shouting a big “fuck you” to the thousands of people across this land who work daily in their neighborhoods to better the lives of their fellow man. Here’s a pro tip: if you want to win an election do not go out of your way to insult a group of people who earn their living by knocking on people’s doors and have an already established network of community outreach.

4. Message. So what exactly was the message from the McCain/Palin team? Honestly, it’s two days after the election and I still have no idea. If John McCain’s worst trait is his willingness to do anything to win, then his second worst trait is his tendency to remind everyone that he’s only doing things in order to win. By October it seemed that McCain was contradicting himself so much that the election looked more like a three-man race. In one interview he would attack Obama as a socialist bent on the redistribution of wealth and then defend his vote for the economic bailout. All politicians are hypocrites, but man, was McCain bad at it.

5. Obamania. When you’re running against the messiah you’d better be bringing your A game. Barack energized not only the base of the Democratic party, but a whole generation of new voters that came out in droves to vote, volunteer and donate whatever they could. He was a media darling. He was cool, intelligent, energetic and other than a few gaffs, extremely consistent in both tone and message. Obama seemed presidential, McCain did not. The full fury of history ran with the Junior Senator from Illinois. His speeches were lofty and inspirational. His rhetoric seeming to elevate America out of the gutter of the Bush years. Obama promised hope and change and spoke to the electorate as though they were good, intelligent people. The next President of the United States got himself elected not only because of what he said, or promised, but what he represented. He is the image of what America really is, of what it can become. Barack Obama is not just a man, he is an ideal, a paradigm shift, just as Kennedy before him. Just as Abraham Lincoln before that. His very presence is transformative. Frankly, running against that kind of cultural change, few people would ever stand a chance.

6. Luck. It’s the economy, stupid. Or as in the case of the 2008 Presidential election, it’s the collapse of the economy, stupid. John McCain was struggling against the Bush legacy, an insane running mate, a historic, transformative change in America’s image, and then if all that wasn’t enough the bubble burst. With the financial crisis on everyone’s minds people did what they always do when the prospect of bad times looms, they drifted toward the protectionist embrace of the Democratic Party. Ironically, again, it was the policies of the Bush administration that laid the foundations for the crisis, as eight years of free-for-all spending and deregulation finally caught up with us. Stack on top of that Colin Powell’s endorsement of Obama (perfectly timed revenge against his former employers) and a wide range of other mishaps, gaffs and media body blows, and you have a Democratic electoral sweep. Barack Obama won this election, but John McCain and a series of fortunate and unfortunate events greatly helped.

November 5th, 2008 by Hoopleton

It’s still sinking in.

Walking around Chicago today it’s hard to meet anyone without a smile on their face. There’s an energy in the air that Americans haven’t felt in eight years, perhaps not even in fifty. Here deep in Obama Country the excitement is indescribable.

Obama is our President. He’s this generation’s Kennedy.

I ended up avoiding Grant Park last night and instead watched election night from a pub on the north side of the city. As the announcement of President-elect Obama’s victory came, at first there was a moment of silence. No one could believe what they were seeing. No one could believe what they were hearing. Then the balloon burst and a roar went up so loud that the walls shook. On the streets car horns blared and people screamed.

I’ve never been one for fanaticism. I still think politicians are crooks. Obama may certainly end a disappointment. But it’s hard to fight the tears of joy today. It may be cliché, but I finally feel hope. Or as a man I met last night said as we shared a drink, “I’m finally proud to be an American again.”

There will be time for analysis tomorrow. For now, I’m still coming down.