Welcome Back

I'm welcoming myself back from a self-imposed break that was much needed and totally taken advantage of. I understand that the timing was somewhat peculiar. Why would I write about the election for over a year and then stop abruptly right before the election? Well, the morning of October 12th, I sat down to do my usual thing where I rail into the farce that was the McCain-Palin ticket and offer praise to my ticket and it hit me. I had become nearly mechanical in my support for the Obama-Biden ticket. To be fair, Obama ran a watertight campaign and I did and still do ardently support him. Still, I lost all ability to fairly scrutinize the ticket. I looked back at some of my primary posts and the tone was much different then. I couldn't figure out why though and that caused some serious derision within me which of course shattered all ambition to write about the election.

It wasn't until recently that I grasped what my problem was. There was this idea that if Obama won this election, we would be living in a new world. It would be a world where the issues of the past would be laid in their proper place. It was as if an Obama win (not an Obama presidency) would purify the nation of its sometimes malevolent past. I, too, had become so fanatical with an Obama win, that I stopped seriously thinking about his presidency.

McCain's "The One" ad comes to mind. Of course McCain was trying to paint an Obama as the anti-Christ, but there was some precision in there. People seemed to believe that an Obama win would be an end-all to their problems. They were anticipating some gust of wind to blow through the ghosts of their past life and open a new door where "hope" could subsist in the absence of empathy.

I remember when Bill Clinton said that Obama’s message was the "biggest fairy tale [he'd] ever heard” -that being, the idea that bipartisanship and most of Obama's campaign mantras would come to a head. He was right. It was a fairy tale prologue. Everything from the speeches to the supporters to the tears and finally the victory was a Cinderella story. Well now, we have all read the story, fallen asleep, had wonderful dreams and it's morning again.

Take this song by will.i.am. released on November 5th.



It's quite a positive song that highlights the remarkable progress that Americans seemed to have made with this election, but the line "I've been fighting for tomorrow for all my life" is particularly interesting to me. It sums up my fear that people were "changing" and "progressing" with Obama for November 4th and that the "tomorrow" he was referring to might not be the future, but simply the feeling of victory on the 5th. Obama was not calling for people to blindly accept his message and candidacy. He was not asking people to vote for him because of the historic nature of this election either. He was asking people to seriously support a progressive agenda and, in effect, help mark the end or at least diminution of American conservatism.

It is a brand new day in American political discourse. Let's just hope some recovering sheep like me stay focused on the message that we so fervently accepted and truly fight for an open and progressive America.