by James M. Wall

Attracted by a Google listing the morning after the election, visitors to this blog linked to a piece I posted two weeks before the election: A Response to an Obama Victory: What an Amazing Country.  Following Barack Obama’s election as our 44h president, a section of that posting bears repeating:

What would be the international impact of an Obama victory? Nicholas D. Kristof offers one answer in a conversation he shared in a recent New York Times column:

The other day I had a conversation with a Beijing friend and I mentioned that Barack Obama was leading in the presidential race:

She: Obama? But he’s the black man, isn’t he?

Me: Yes, exactly.

She: But surely a black man couldn’t become president of the United States?

Me: It looks as if he’ll be elected.

She: But president? That’s such an important job! In America, I thought blacks were janitors and laborers.

Me: No, blacks have all kinds of jobs.

She: What do white people think about that, about getting a black president? Are they upset? Are they angry?

Me: No, of course not! If Obama is elected, it’ll be because white people voted for him.

[Long pause.]

She: Really? Unbelievable! What an amazing country!

We’re beginning to get a sense of how Barack Obama’s political success could change global perceptions of the United States, redefining the American “brand” to be less about Guantánamo and more about equality. . . . (Emphasis added).

Obama’s speech to the world, his first as president-elect, was a paradigmatic moment in world history.  The pictures from Grant Park in Chicago and from around the world, reveal the wonder and excitement of what Obama’s election means to the world.  

The text of his remarkable 17-minute address will be studied for years to come as a seminal turning point in American history. It also marks a dramatic turning point in American politics.

Greg Sargent sees Obama’s election as the potential end of a style of politics that emerged from the culture wars of the “Sixties”. Sargent is an equal opportunity critic. He finds fault with both the political left and the political right for their use of tactics that polarized our national political dialogue.  

Obama’s victory represents a potential death knell — but only a potential one — for the 1960s cultural politics that defined and dominated our political landscape for the last four decades of the 20th Century.

There’s a tidy symmetry in the fact that Obama defeated, in succession, both the Clinton machine and the Rove-Atwater brand of politics that Republicans have honed for so long.

In so doing, Obama defeated not one, but both of the leading practitioners of that 1960s-rooted cultural politics. More to the point, he did this by quite literally running against politics as both those groups practiced it.

As a proponent of the Rove-Atwater political brand,  Senator John McCain encouraged, tolerated, and participated in, a series of “guilt by association” attacks that sought to stir fear and hatred among voters, the sort of attacks used by Republican Senator Joe McCarthy to smear his opponents as “Communists”. 

The attacks used by McCain aganst Obama’s “associates”,  Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers, and Rashid Khalidi, were all aimed at men who have earned advanced university  degrees. Each of them have a strong record of leadership in their respective fields.  

Professor Bill Ayers was one of the ‘associates” of Barack Obama who suffered repeated, and grossly unfair, attacks during the campaign.  Ayers voted Tuesday at the same polling place used by Barack and Michelle Obama. The Chicago Tribune reported Ayers’ observations after he voted:

[Professor Ayers] left about 20 minutes before Obama arrived and declined to say for whom he had voted. He did, however, later tell The Washington Post that Obama’s opponents had turned him into a “cartoon character” and disputed Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin’s accusation that Obama “palled around” with terrorists. 

“Pal around together? What does that mean? Share a milkshake with two straws?” Ayers told the Post. “I think my relationship with Obama was probably like thousands of others in Chicago. And, like millions and millions of others, I wish I knew him better.”

Smearing political opponents by demonizing their “associates” is a campaign tactic that has run past its expiration date. That tactic is not only demeaning to those attacked, but it demeans our democratic process.

The failure of the smear tactics employed by the McCain campaign, and its related groups, is a textbook example of what will not work with a strong opponent. 

Paul Krugman knows the “robo call” crowd was badly beaten by the Obama campaign. He does not, however, expect it to go away:

Republicans will engage in some soul-searching, that they’ll ask themselves whether and how they lost touch with the national mainstream. But my prediction is that this won’t happen any time soon. 

Instead, the Republican rump, the party that’s left after the election, will be the party that attends Sarah Palin’s rallies, where crowds chant “Vote McCain, not Hussein!” It will be the party of Saxby Chambliss, the senator from Georgia, who, observing large-scale early voting by African-Americans, warns his supporters that “the other folks are voting.” It will be the party that harbors menacing fantasies about Barack Obama’s Marxist — or was that Islamic? — roots.

Why will the G.O.P. become more, not less, extreme? For one thing, projections suggest that this election will drive many of the remaining Republican moderates out of Congress, while leaving the hard right in place.

Conservative and respected “brainy” columnists like David Brooks and George Will gave up on McCain in the final weeks of the campaign. They knew he had gone over to the dark side.

McCain became so desperate to win that he ignored the counsel of people like Brooks and Will. He also accepted the advice of campaign handlers to brand his opponent as an “elitist”. He did this to court the support of voters he assumed to be anti-intellectual.

The final vote results demonstrated that he was wrong. Every political movement needs its own educated “elite” to provide constant reformation of its guiding principles. The John McCain who lost to George Bush in the Republican primaries of 2000 knew that.  This new McCain did not.