election night ramblings

Already there’s been quite a bit of writing, remarking, and blogging on the Obama victory as a sort of national catharsis. But like the fluid identity of Obama himself, the emotional healing enters the picture from any number of angles. Here’s mine.

Forty years after the Chicago Police, under orders from Mayor Richard J. Daley—remembered by more than a few from that time as an out and out racist—beat down the anti-war demonstrators in Grant Park during the DNC and in the process established definitively a split between the New Left and the Democratic Party, the younger Mayor Daley welcomed supporters of Barack Obama downtown for the election night celebration party, whether they had tickets or not. He did this knowing full well he was putting his fate into the hands of a young leader who, if he’d had the curse to stand before the throngs in defeat, or worse, perceived criminal theft of an election, would have had the responsibility to quell an unfolding riot, if not a new civil war.

This act of faith on the part of Richard Daley the Son, seemed to offer another dimension to the feeling of this election’s seeming resolution of long-standing divides:  after ’68, Nixon, the ineffective Carter, the victorious Reagan, the centrist Clinton, and the nightmare that is Bush the Younger, is the Left back in the fold of the Democratic Party? It is a fair question, because the activist Left put in some serious work for the Obama campaign, in the meantime shelving work on many other struggles. Also, there is the plain reality of the incessent right wing chatter/incantation of the names Bill Ayers, ACORN, and Jeremiah Wright—names, groups, and lineages (SDS, Weather Underground, Alinsky-style organizing around poverty issues, black liberation theology) to which, really, only the activist Left are positively attached. When such associations were used to attack Obama many leftists felt a righteous responsibility to contribute to the campaign, no matter the falseness or prespostureousness of the charges. In other words, just as it assisted Obama in uniting the rest of the fractured social body to form a single voting majority, the Right did an excellent job of driving the activist Left directly into the waiting arms (and stacks of phone bank lists) of the Obama campaign.

The activist Left will be disappointed with Obama. We all know that. But the present day Left’s aversion to party politics—and to the Democratic Party in particular—may not soon return to its pre-Obama state. For one thing, the paranoid Right won’t silence its chatter anytime real soon, and may even amplify it in the coming months. Every time Bill Ayers is trotted out as a bogeyman, the Left has a responsibility to respond, if only to defend our own history. But each response probably will, conveniently for Obama and the revitalized Dems, contain at least a trace defense of Obama, and therefore remain somewhat positionable within that camp. The regional, ideological, cultural, and, most importantly, political marginalization of the Right is one consequence of this united Center-Left. And for that I will not complain.

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Watching the Republican television commentators tonight was alternately baffling, wince-inducing, and just plain infuriating. Baffling, because they just didn’t seem to get it. Not a single one of them whom I saw—Karl Rove, John Bolton, Bill Bennett, Pat Buchanan, Tom Delay, and others--acknowledged their failures and looked in the mirror. I can’t help thinking, don’t they want to know what went wrong and why they lost? For example, Rove smugly reminded viewers that Democratic Congressional leadership has earned negatives right down there with his old boss, W. But he never stopped to consider the possibility that Pelosi’s disapproval numbers might have something to do with the fact that in one of her first (non) acts as House Speaker, she took impeachment ‘of the table.’ Their pathetic attempts to cast early doubt on an Obama administration by continuing the very lines of attack that earned them the evening’s national electoral doghouse caused me to wince out of a combination of embarrassment and irritation. The infuriation came when after the election had been called and the discussions turned to how Obama’s achievement stands in the context of the struggle for racial justice in America. John Bolton’s first remark on this topic to BBC telejournalists was a belligerent demand that Europeans never again accuse America of having a racial problem—as if all racial problems were done with, and, furthermore, that he and his extremist wingnut gang had something to do with solving this problem! Others spoke of having lifted the ‘excuse’ of racism—as if they could take credit for this positive turn in American social evolution! Unbelieveable.

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The world is getting to know Chicago. The faces we saw at the Grant Park celebration? That is Chicago, and that, Sarah Palin, is the real America. It is the America I love seeing. And what about the bullet-proof glass behind which Obama delivered his victory speech? That, too, is Chicago—specifically, the South Side, where in some parts a majority of one’s consumer purchases may be conducted through bullet-proof glass. I know it was a Secret Service thing, and it wasn’t to protect against a stick-up, and they had them polished to near-liquid invisibility, but having made my home on the South Side for more than a decade, I must say, it was the slightest bit ghetto. You could even say, as far as bullet-proof protection goes, it was ghetto fab. Which is also very Chicago. These were to the world of bullet-proof glass what glittering, spinning rims are to the world of hydraulic rides.

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In the discussions of an expanded Democratic electorate, it is worth noting that the election to the US Senate of the Udall cousins in Colorado and New Mexico marks a return as much as it does a departure. Sure, Obama broke ground as an urban-based, minority candidate who found success in the West, but the Udalls bring the federal political profile of the mountain west back to its progressive roots. Being the sons of Mo Udall and Stewart Udall, putting conservation on the federal agenda runs in their blood. Hopefully, the younger Udalls will bring to the Senate a full backlash against the evisceration of America’s wilderness heritage and the deliberate despoilation of western government land under the Bushites. This is an incredibly important moment for such issues, as last minute orders on use of federal lands—sometimes impossible to undo—have become standard fare for lame duck presidents in recent administrations.

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On the morning of Election Day I had my semi-regular meeting with my language tutor/coach, a native of Beijing. The day’s discussion of course went straight to the elections. Never having voted, and not having grown up in a society with elections, he had many questions for me. When are the votes counted? Is a winner announced the same day? If this is a federal election, then why do all the states have their own voting rules, hours, and machines? In my halting Mandarin and spotty knowledge about the ins and outs of election operations, I tried to explain the American way. He described the Chinese way, by contrast, as really simple. You never vote. There are elections for representatives to the National Congress, but they are never announced, never publicized, there are no campaigns, and most people hear about them only after the fact, if at all. And there is no information about what the representative then does or says. Worse yet, in the various congresses, all votes are taken by a show of hands, which serves to encourage super majorities and frequently unanimity, especially on sensitive measures. So it is true—China is not a democracy. On the other hand, how would it even begin, should the CCP decide to start an electoral process? Does India’s system work any better? By and large, the Chinese do not think so.