“In record numbers, Americans voted on Tuesday for a skillful presidential nominee promising change, but “change” should not be confused with a license to raise taxes, drive up wasteful government spending, weaken our security, or give more power to Washington, Big Labor bosses and the trial bar. Americans did not vote for higher taxes to fund a redistribution of wealth; drastic cuts in funding for our troops; the end of secret ballots for workers participating in union elections; more costly obstacles to American energy production; or the imposition of government-run health care on employers and working families.”  – John Boehner Washington Post

     Did this guy see the same campaign and election that I saw? In the campaign that I saw President-elect Barack Obama laid out in no uncertain terms what his agenda was and what he wanted to accomplish. There were no hidden innuendos or code words; he stated as a matter of fact what he felt the government’s role was and how he planned to implement that role. And despite Mr. Boehner’s claims to the contrary, the majority of the American public voted to accept this candidate and his agenda. We have seen for the last two election cycles the electorate’s repudiation of the Republican ideas and their tactics and yet they continue to believe that nothing has changed. Many of them feel that the reason they lost was because they weren’t right of center enough. If this continues this Party will be replaced by another one and they will become strictly a regional and rural Party.

    My belief is that the Republicans in the Congress are going to become obstructionists as they were during the 90’s. They are exposing to the American people that they are devoid of original thought and so rather than propose they merely condemn. In the current political climate I don’t think the people are going to be responsive to that type of politics. I just hope the Democrats do not respond to this election as they did after the 2006 election with fear and trepidation. If the Republicans goal is to remain adrift in the wilderness then this is the way to do it. Mr. Boehner wrote of Republican ideas to solve the economic crisis but from what I and many of my fellow citizens heard trickledown economics is not going to sell. I think the majority of people are tired of being trickled on, I know I am.

    Maybe I am crazy but I thought if you ran on a platform and you won by an impressive margin then you get to enact that platform. Mr. Boehner obviously feels that the margin of victory wasn’t convincing enough. What he refuses to see is not necessarily in the raw numbers of how many, but in who voted for whom. The Republicans may have won the cultural debate but they have lost the intellectual debate. Many of the so-called Reagan Democrats and moderate Republicans voted for President-elect Obama. He won in the 100,000 income group, the 200,000 income group, and with the suburban voters. I have never agreed with the Reagan Democrat lie, those voters are just socially conscious Republicans. If it were not for the die-hard Southerners who many as we know voted on issues besides competence in this election, the rout would have been unprecedented.

    President-elect Obama was able to forge a new majority that resembles more of how America resembles. The country is changing and someone forgot to tell the Republicans. President-elect Obama won the Latino vote, the advanced degree vote, and the urban vote. America is becoming darker, smarter, and more urbane and the cultural warfare argument has lost its appeal among these voters. What the Republicans don’t realize is that there are more “other” Americans than there are “real” Americans and that base is shrinking all the time. It’s funny how the Republican apologists have settled on two causes for their defeat and they are the economic downturn and Governor Sarah Palin. I disagree on both counts. While an impending depression does have a tendency to hurt the incumbent party I don’t think that the downturn in and of itself caused the campaign melt-down of Senator McCain. Many point to his small lead in September that vanished with the news of the melt-down. This idea completely ignores two very important facts. The first is that the policies of the Republicans led to this debacle. It wasn’t like this was the result of some unpredictable calamities. The second is that it ignores the response of Senator McCain to the crisis. As far as Governor Palin is concerned granted she was a Hail-Mary but let’s face it McCain was going to lose anyway. This was not the election for two pasty old white dudes to win. That was not what the country was looking for.

    So it is my hope that Republicans continue to live in their alternative reality of phony outrage and crisis’s while we continue to offer the new America “a change they can believe in”. I use to think these people were bad people but that is not the case. They just don’t get it and I am not sure they ever will.

“You can safely assume that you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.” – Anne Lamott

The Disputed Truth

Not to be immodest about the US progressive movement’s efficacy, but we apparently didn’t just win this for America’s sake. That’s some powerful good we worked in the world. 🙂

I realize that this is topically a bit bigger than the state blog beat, but we ought to take ownership of the meta/civilizational changes we helped create too.

Obama’s victory stirs Europe to confront race issue

LONDON – For months before Barack Obama’s election last week, his popularity ratings in Europe soared to levels never matched in America. Now that Obama is headed to the Oval Office as the first African-American president, his victory is prompting Europeans to confront some uncomfortable questions about race within their own countries.

In Britain, the head of the government’s Equality and Human Rights Commission sparked a public debate for saying that a minority politician as “brilliant” as Obama would struggle to “break through the institutional stranglehold on power within the Labor Party.”

“The problem is not the electorate, the problem is the machine,” Trevor Phillips, who is black, told The Times of London. “It’s institutional racism” that extends beyond a single political party, he said.

In France, meanwhile, the wife of President Nicolas Sarkozy has thrown her support behind a new campaign that seeks to wipe out racism and end the white stranglehold on France’s elite political and social institutions. Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, a musician and former model, is backing a manifesto published over the weekend that is subtitled “Oui, nous pouvons!” (French for “Yes, we can!”).

Obama’s victory “highlights via a cruel contrast the shortcomings of the French Republic, and the distance that separates us from a country whose citizens knew how to go beyond the racial question and elect a man who happens to be black as president,” the statement said.

The manifesto urged the adoption of U.S.-style affirmative-action programs to promote minorities in education and workplaces — a radical departure for France, which does not even record race in its national census. The French manifesto was launched by Yazid Sabeg, a millionaire who is the son of Algerian immigrants, and is backed by many members of the French elite,

Community groups in Britain and France, which are home to some of Europe’s most racially mixed cities, have long urged an increase in what is now a minuscule minority presence in politics. They have seized on Obama’s victory as a means to energize minority communities.

About 8 percent of the British population is non-white, but only 15 of the 646 members of parliament – just 2 percent _are non-white. In France, the non-white population is estimated at 12 percent, but there is only one non-white member of the National Assembly. By comparison, there will be 75 non-whites out of 435 representatives in the new U.S. House of Representatives and five non-whites in the 100-member Senate.

Mark Lattimer, executive director of Minority Rights Group, an international non-profit, says “structural obstacles” partly account for the lack of advancement among minority politicians in Europe. These range from the way that party insiders pick candidates for national office, to the lack of official recognition of racial or ethnic minorities in France, to nationality laws in Germany that were traditionally based on descent (rather than place of birth, which has hindered immigrants from Turkey and elsewhere).

“You need more than role models” to elevate more minorities to the elite ranks of politics in Europe, according to Lattimer.

David Lammy, a black minister in Britain’s Labor government, says he rejoices in Obama’s message of hope. Lammy, who first met Obama at a Harvard alumni event several years ago and went to Wisconsin to observe his campaign last winter, says Britain can learn from Obama’s success. For instance, he says a closed “political class,” supported by a patronage system, discourages newcomers from getting involved in politics.

Yet racism has reared its head in the days since Obama was elected. A Polish legislator told his colleagues in parliament last week that Obama’s victory meant “the end of the white man’s civilization”. A well-known Austrian journalist said on television that he “wouldn’t want the Western world to be directed by a black man.”

Story here.

My favorite McLaughlin Group food-fighter was in Kansas City last night for a discussion with R. Crosby Kemper III billed as “After the Election:  What Comes Next?”

She did not disappoint – she is every bit as quick to shoot down my (grudgingly) favorite Republican (Crosby) as she is to slap down Pat Buchanan or that unctuous twit Monica Crowley.   He tried his hand at high comedy in his opening by asking her if it was true that before the President Elect’s appearance in Grant Park on election night if he walked across Lake Michigan.  She dealt with this bit of silliness deftly by pointing out that casting the newly elected president as the leader or a “cult of personality” smartassery is nothing more than a way to demean him, and segued into the way Obama changed the electorate.  “Not since Bobby Kennedy has a political figure so captured the imagination of the nation and specifically of young people.  He won something like two-thirds of the votes of people under thirty.”  She went on to explain that what this means is that the republicans didn’t just lose an election, they have potentially lost a generation, and that has the potential to realign the political map.  

Crosby apologized immediately as soon as it was his turn to talk again – he really was just being a smartass and didn’t mean to be demeaning.  (His ability to roll with the punches and take his lumps in good humor is why I like the guy on a personal level, his association with that wingnut outfit the “Show Me Institute” notwithstanding.)   But still – that bit of contrition on Crosby’s part alone made braving the cold, wet weather we had to go out in to attend the packed forum to see her worth it.   At least Cros didn’t yell over her when she made points that  run counter to his political leanings, and given the company she keeps on a weekly basis, that had to be a refreshing change.  

Eleanor Clift has been covering politics for Newsweek for over thirty years, all the way back to Jimmy Carter’s 1976 campaign for the presidency, so she has the perspective to place current events in historical context.  

When Crosby brought up the experience issue, Eleanor zeroed in on McCain flopping his ace by picking the not-ready-for-prime-time Palin.  Here she skipped over my favorite counterargument:  I point out all the scads of experience that Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney brought to the Bush administration, and look where that got us.   Not that Eleanor Clift needs my advice on spanking republicans.  After all, it’s her life’s work!  

The electoral map has indeed been redrawn, to the point that the current incarnation of the republican party has been beaten back to a handful of southern and western states.  

Take that to the next logical step, and the remaining republicans are really two parties.  The south is populated by theocons who are driven by religion and their desire to impose their dogma on the rest of us, and the western states are populated by republicans of the libertarian variety.  Where this leaves the money-cons like Crosby is anyone’s guess, and we will all be interested in seeing where they end up over the next couple of election cycles.  

Whatever happens next, I hope Crosby will bring her back to talk to us again.  If he does, I will be there no matter what sort of nasty weather I have to brave to attend!

Your current Missouri election results

John McCain, Sarah Palin REP 1,444,289 49.4%  

Barack Obama, Joe Biden DEM 1,439,321 49.3%  

Bob Barr, Wayne A. Root LIB 11,370 .4%  

Chuck Baldwin, Darrell Castle CST 8,190 .3%  

Ralph Nader, Matt Gonzalez IND 17,787 .6%  

Cynthia McKinney, Rosa Clemente WI 983 .0%  

Total Votes  2,921,940

the margin has narrowed by 900 votes since the first complete count came in. Notable new reports: McCain 353, Obama 350 in the JCEB part of Jackson County. Obama 226, McCain 32 in St. Louis City.

No idea on if these are provisionals floating in already.