Yes, the Bush Administration is now gone, with Bush himself finally helicoptered out. And just look at this exquisite satellite photo [1] of yesterday’s crowd for the swearing in!
We’d like to think that the American people have now seen the light, and that we can now rationally approach solutions to the massive problems we now face (many of them caused by the ineptitude and corruption of the Bush ministration). But not so fast! There is no dependable numerical mandate supporting Obama.
In order to get Barack Obama into the White House, it took a perfect storm to hit the Republicans and their followers. The forces of rationality occupy the White House only by a relative sliver in a country that is still largely antagonistic to Obama, or apathetic. That is the conclusion of Mark Slouka, who wrote February’s “Notebook” for the February edition of Harper’s Magazine [2].
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First of all, Slouka holds up a mirror to our collective ignorance:
One out of every four of us believes we been reincarnated; 44% of us believe in ghosts; 71%, in Angels. 40% of us believe God created all things in their present form sometime during the last 10,000 years. Nearly the same number–not coincidentally, perhaps–are functionally illiterate. 20% think the sun might revolve around the earth.
Slouka then reminds us about all the things that had to happen in order to sour the American public on the Republican administration:
For starters, consider how easily things might have gone the other way had the political and economic climate not combined into a perfect political storm for the Republican Party; had the Dow then 1000 points higher in September, or gas a dollar cheaper. Truth is, we got lucky; the bullet grazed our skull.
[C]onsider the numbers. Of the approximately 130,000,000 Americans who voted this past November, very nearly half, seemingly stuck in political puberty, were untroubled by the possibility of Sarah Palin and the First Dude inheriting the White House …
The real problem, the acknowledged that underlying American democracy, is a 38% of the population who didn’t move, it didn’t vote. Think of it: a country the size of Germany-83 million people-within our own borders. Many of its citizens, after decades of watching the status quo perpetuated itself, are presumably too fed up to bother, a stance we can sympathize with and still condemn for its petulance and immaturity, its unwillingness to challenge the fact that in every election there is a better and a worse choice …
[A] significant number of our fellow citizens are now as greedy and gullible as a box full of puppies; they’ll believe anything; they’ll attack the empty glove; they’ll follow that plastic bone right off the cliff. Nothing about this election has changed that fact.
I would add that Obama probably wouldn’t have won had McCain chosen anyone reasonably competent as his running mate, someone other than Sarah Palin. Based on my conversations with several conservatives and moderates who ended up voting for Obama, I suspect that that McCain’s selection of Palin, more than anything else, allowed Obama to prevail. It was a pure gift from McCain. It was so bizarre that one is tempted to put on one’s Psychologist Hat and attempt to find an attempt to lose residing in McCain.
Slouka’s fine article is apparently not available online to nonsubscribers, but this hurdle should serve as a good reminder that one can subscribe to Harper’s Magazine [2] and have access to lots of insightful writing like Slouka’s. I do.
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