The victory of Barack Obama
I always enjoy it when pundits are proved wrong, even if the pundit is me.
For example: remember how they said Spanish-speaking voters wouldn't vote for a black candidate in the presidential election? They did, by more than 2-1.
How blue-collar working class voters wouldn't support a smart Chicago lawyer? Yes, they did, in states like Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania.
How voters lie to pollsters about supporting a black candidate, because they don't want to look racist? If anything, it was the opposite ... it seems that slightly more people voted for Barack Obama than the polls suggested.
Oh, and how I went to Missouri in September, because Missouri always gets it right? Er, not this time, it seems, because the unofficial indications are that by the slimmest of margins, it went for John McCain, even while Barack Obama was basking in victory.
And here are a couple more little nuggets for you. Obama won the largest share of white support of any Democrat in a two-man race since 1976. He won 43 percent of white voters and 96 percent of black voters. But despite a massive drive to register new black voters, national turn-out among blacks was just two per cent higher than last time.
A columnist in the New York Times yesterday called this week's election "the first real 21st century election ... As a nation, we rejoin the world community. As a sustaining narrative, we found our story again."
I think that may be over-stating it. America is still split down the middle - there are nearly as many people who weren't persuaded by the Obama oratory as those who were ... and for all the jubilation out on the streets of the major urban centres, there are still many millions of Americans who view the prospect of an Obama presidency with forboding.
And yet. Can you think of any other country which has elected as its head of state someone from a minority community? The only one I can think of is Peru, which in 1990 elected Alberto Fujimori as president. (Not a happy precedent, in fact: he's currently serving a six-year prison sentence for abuse of power.)
The symbolism of a black president in the White House is over-powering, and if you doubt its significance to African Americans, just listen to my interview with the writer and civil rights activist Maya Angelou, which was broadcast on The World Tonight and Newshour on Wednesday evening and is still available online.
The scenes of enthusiasm which greeted Obama's victory were stunning - Washington on Tuesday night felt a bit like I remember London feeling on that night in May 1997 when Tony Blair was first elected. A new beginning, a fresh start, a young leader with a young family, brimming with ideas and energy.
This is no time to dampen his supporters' enthusiasm. But as their euphoria begins to fade, they will have to acknowledge that excitement will soon give way to the gruelling reality of governing an America that's in the grip of a deep economic downturn and embroiled in two messy wars.
It has been a fascinating week to be in the US - and the Obama presidency will be well worth watching.
© MMIX~RS~q~RS~~RS~z~RS~26~RS~)
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Strangely enough, I had noticed that prior to the actual election the colour of Obama's skin and relevance was kept fairly low key and at best was just an elephant in the room. The BBC certainly did its very best to not allude to Obama being black let alone a man of colour prior to the election!
Post-election the trumpetting is all about the message "We can do it!" being a message that a black person can now aspire to the oval office. Now, it seems, it is apparently politically correct to make a big deal about his skin colour?
What has actually changed though?
For me, as an observer, it is that Barack Obama has actually got down to speaking to the individual and got "the people" most likely to vote for him actively interested in politics again. That has been critical to the success of the Democrats. The people who are racially prejudiced have been sidelined but the majority and that is a great thing.
13% of the USA population is black but it still took the young, the hispanics and other ethnic groups, and the now politically motivated "people" to elect Obama.
The simple truth is not that Obama is black being the major story but that the Republican Party now only represents the older generation of US citizens who now form a minority within the USA. Any suggestion that the Republican Party actually stand for being the the party that represents the white population of America would be a fallacy.
This election seemed to me to more simply a case of "cometh the hour and cometh the man" and Obama was undoubtedly the man that the majority of American voters believe is the man for the moment.
The problem for the US is that Obama has made a promise for change and other political pledges. I fear that he is going to have to renege on many of his promises so the euphoria of electing the first black president and more importantly a socialist Democrat is going to whither over the next four years or maybe even only as long as the 100-day honeymoon!
The worst possible scenario would be that Barack Obama becomes remembered not as the first black President of the USA but the worst President of the USA.
I wish him and the USA all the very best of luck. I think they need it.
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#1, Menedemus--
W. has set the bar so high for "worst President" that no one will come near it for a long, long time.
The Republican party is not a pary of old folks, and not even properly of an old way of life: in fact, there is not a single unifying position to the party.
The Republican party is a partnership of two groups: fiscal conservatives, who endorse pro-business policies and claim that business profits will "trickle down" to those of us in the working class; and social conservatives, who want America at home to look like a Christianized version of Leave It To Beaver and America abroad to look like it did immediately after World War 2.
In practice, there's also a mentality of class war against those who live on state subsidies: the rhetoric being that these lazy, shiftless people live off of money the government legally steals from honest, hard-working Americans.
So, the nexus of issues you find in the Republican party are: "pro-life," which means absolutely no legal abortion, unless delivering the child might kill the mother; no teaching of evolution in public schools, since this is a propaganda campaign to destroy Christianity; the "flat tax," which means tax poor people at the same proportion of their income as rich people.
There are two foreign relations policies, depending on whether you're talking toa fiscal or social conservative: that very few of our problems with foreign relations problems can't be solved with military intervention; and that our corporations need unrestricted trade with the rest of the world, 'unrestricted trade' meaning they need tax breaks for setting up factories in third-world countries with no labor laws.
The problem for Republicans now is that W. was remarkably successful in delivering on all of this, which resulted in a currently-unwinnable war (since the war can't be resolved without recourse to diplomatic solutions, which W. doesn't value), in a number of scandals (since packing government with incompetent Christian fundamentalists wasn't the platform he was elected on), in the current lunatic spending (which our granchildren and great-grandchildren will still be paying off), and in the current financial melt-down (which will cost even more to remedy).
Since there is footage on YouTube of a fundamentalist witch hunter telling Sarah Palin's congregation that they needed to find more ways to infiltrate government before bringing her on stage to lay hands on her, I can only assume she was more of the same.
I've always considered McCain to be a sane and honorable man, but he made a dreadful compromise in picking Palin as his VP.
-FreeClench
http://freeclench.blogspot.com
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Robin--good story. I posted a comment earlier on another blog of BBC regarding the reporting of various vets from NC who seemed to be concerned regarding our new commander in chief. My comments were essentially this: these vets got to be kidding or perhaps racist. Why? Give me a break! we just had 8 years of GWB and Dick Cheney, two fakes who couldn't fight their way out of a f'n paper bag and these guys question Obama? This guy is (atleast) 5 times smarter that both Cheney and Bush combined; he's an athlete, a basketball player who, like your Euro futbol players are extremely competitive and hate to lose! We're in good hands w/ Obama, but those rednecks from NC and elsewhere can gladly form their own country down in Texas--they are the obvious "unamericans" the rightwing is always alluding to.
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The Obama campaign has been centred around the key message of change and certainly, the US appears to need this. He comes across as a thoughtful and intelligent man who is not too proud or arrogant to take advice so I would not be unduly concerned about his qualifications as commander in chief. Neither would I worry about his economic credentials. There is no shortage of sound advice available on that subject as well.
What worries me slightly are the huge hopes that the rest of the world have pinned on him. The Europeans in particular have been keen to identify him as someone who will reach out to them. They should be in no doubt that this will not be one way traffic. In return for being more collaborative and consultative, he will expect input. NATO members who have not committed as fully as they might to Afghanistan or put in special conditions such as Helmand being off limits are in for a rude awakening. It may also be that his economic policies might tend to push him towards protectionism. Car manufacturers can expect a particularly rough ride as he takes measures to help Detroit, just to take one example.
It is far too early to discern the style of the presidency, still less the substance but certainly he shows the potential to be a great president. But a soft touch, he will not be and there are some this side of the pond who maybe are taking too much for granted.
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" ...think that may be over-stating it. America is still split down the middle - there are nearly as many people who weren't persuaded by the Obama oratory as those who were ... and for all the jubilation out on the streets of the major urban centres, there are still many millions of Americans who view the prospect of an Obama presidency with forboding..."
#2 These points are close to the truth.
Fifty-one percent is a thin margin.
Does anyone know what the margin of voter support was when Roosevelt was first elected?
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#5 - Xie_Ming
57% and 44 states in 1932.
The technical definition of a 'landslide', by the way, is 55% of the popular vote in a society where margins are usually narrow. In the great order of things, 51% is not bad.
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5. Xie_Ming:
51%, or whatever it turns out to be -- that was an off-the-cuff description -- is considerably better than the 49% that W. got in '00; no telling what he'd have gotten in '04 if there weren't voter irregularities in Ohio.
When in the run-up to his second term people got out the bumper-stickers saying: "BUSH: Re-Defeat Him In '04" they thought they were kidding.
-FreeClench
http://freeclench.blogspot.com
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Electing a member of a minority? That'll be just about every election ever - men are a minority in just about every country.
Pascal Couchepin is one current example of an elected leader from a minority that springs to mind, and he's not the first of his kind to hold his post. Arguably Flavio Cotti was an even bigger deal.
You and your colleagues might want to report on one of the first material changes resulting from Obama's victory - the reduction in investment in UK renewable energy. On Friday it emerged that BP are stopping investment in UK renewables and carbon capture and moving all such investment to the US "because the returns are better". The reason for the better returns is that they can offset investment against Obama's windfall tax on oil companies. Not quite what his British fans were anticipating - but that's a real change, believe it.
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As neither party had a viable candidate for President in my opinion, I voted no. That is I did not endorse either Obama or McCain. To say that McCain;s judgement proved flawed hardly begins to explain his defects. He said the economy was in good condition and a week later the bottom fell out of the stock market. Congress and the President had to meet in an emergency to pass a 700 billion dollar bail out just to keep the entire economy from grinding to a halt. Now his supporters are blaming Sarah Palin for his defeat. But who picked her? If true it's another serious error in his judgement, if not a damnable lie making her a scapegoat for his other failings and not worthy of a President.
Obama is no prize. He has virtually no experience in government worth mentioning that suggests he qualifies to be president. He was as clueless about the economy as McCain. His chosen VP Senator Biden said in an interview about a year or so ago that he advocated breaking up Iraq into three mostly autonamous regions with a weak central government, a sure prescription for a civil war. Biden supported the invasion and along with Hillary Clinton sad Obama was not qualified to be Commander-in-Chief. Either Biden was lying one time or the other or Obama suddenly learned an awful lot about what it means to run the most powerful military in the world in a matter of months. This is very unlikely given his hectic schedule. Either man would consult with the same economic "experts" who bankrupted the entire world with their badly flawed theories of economics and learned nothing from the great depression.
With the looming threat of Iran, Russia, North Korea still unresolved and a major recession or depression ahead, it's small wonder that many of us look at the future with foreboding. And now we have a tyro at the helm. The notion of a landslide is badly overblown. The popular vote is the key. If Obama won every state by 1 vote, he'd have gotten all of the electoral votes but would only have won the popular vote by 50 votes out of over 130 million cast. Is that a landslide? Looking at the popular votes for other electoins Johnson versus Goldwater, Nixon versus McGovern, Reagan versus Mondale, those were landslides. Not this one IMO. The country really is split down the middle. So Obama or McCain? It was Tweedle-dee, Tweedle-dum as far as I was concerned. The next four years should be interesting.
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This result is rightly haled as a victory for democracy especially so because the President-Elect has achieved not only the majority of votes but over 50% of the votes cast. The people have made their choice and they will have high hopes that Obama can deliver.
Whether they actually understood what Obama was promising I very much doubt but thay have clearly decided that it is the Democrats turn and there are going to be more Democrats in Washigton now than before so the new President will not be alone after the 20 January 2009.
However, I did pick up on something very intersting mentiponed during the BBC reporting on the day of the Election and that was that overseas ballots of forces personnel don't get counted if their votes will not make a difference? Is that right and if so is that fair?
If the overseas votes from forces personnel were counted and they were for McCain then the result would still stand no dount but the margin of difference might look just a little more close.
Nevertheless, whatever the result, it does seem that some people who voted in the American Election are disenfranchised by this no-count implementation?
Can anyone confirm this process and explain the whys and wherefores to this outsider.
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Has another country elected a minority leader?
I suppose it depends how you describe minority. If you class women as a minority group (not in a numerical sense but in the sense of being historically deicriminated against) then many countries have or have had elected women leaders.
If it's on religious grounds ... Ireland has had protestant presidents and the UK has had a PM of jewish decent and the current prime minister of India is a sihk and India has had "untouchables" as president. Does decent form immigrants count as minority if so then I believe the father of Mr Sarkozy of France was an immigrant from Hungary. It may be stretching the point but possibly Angela Merkel's background as being from the former GDR makes her a minority? Pierre Trudeau was Canada's PM but was Quebois. UK has had Welsh and Scottish PM's.....
However none of the above should detract from Obama's amazing achievement.
You're all doing very well !!
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Whites in South Africa were always a minority but were elected under apartheid. So what does that prove? The real question is; does the best qualified candidate get elected regardless of race, religion, ethnicity, gender, gender preference, and other aspects of their lives which have nothing to do with their abilities? In the US Presidential race the answer is that we don't know but from the field of candidates, there were slim pickins'. IMO Hillary Clinton was the better candidate but she was in the eyes of many discriminated aganist because of her gender. Let's not ignore the fact that while many whites voted for Obama despite the fact that he was black because they felt he was the better candidate, almost all blacks voted for him, many simply because he is black. These facts prove that America still has a way to go before ALL of its citizens cast their votes based on who is best for the country, not who they like most because they "identify" with him...or her.
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