It isn't that Barack Obama represents some shining progressive city on a hill; a bus ride to "the magic hopeful place", as Marc Maron mused a few weeks ago during an appearance on Conan O'Brien's show. Assuming he pulls this out today, I expect him to be a moderate Democratic president in the Bill Clinton mode only without the relentless and pervasive need to be liked and to be the center of attention -- and of course with his brain located in his cranium instead of someplace else. I also expect his effectiveness to be limited, given the unlikeliness of having a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. I expect Republicans to block everything Obama wants to do, and Harry Reid to cave every time. I would hope that Reid would MAKE them filibuster, but I'm not optimistic.
I think that after we take our five minutes to celebrate tonight (assuming -- and it's a big assumption that I'm not yet ready to make -- that there's something to celebrate), it's important to note that the forces conspiring against us are still out there and they are not going away. They are the forces of theocracy, of ignorance, of fear and loathing. They are the forces that would bring a new Middle Ages to this country and roll back the progress that has the potential to make this country great again, even though that progress means an end to racial, gender, and sexual orientation hatred. Those forces are embodied in Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber and Michelle Bachmann and the preachers in their megachurches who rake in big bucks playing on people's fears. They are not going away, and we will have to fight them every step of the way.
Bob Herbert writes today about what we face from these people:
Right now the United States is a country in which wealth is funneled, absurdly, from the bottom to the top. The richest 1 percent of Americans now holds close to 40 percent of all the wealth in the nation and maintains an iron grip on the levers of government power.
This is not only unfair, but self-defeating. The U.S. cannot thrive with its fabulous wealth concentrated at the top and the middle class on its knees. (No one even bothers to talk about the poor anymore.) How to correct this imbalance is one of the biggest questions facing the country.
The U.S. is also a country in which blissful ignorance is celebrated, and intellectual excellence (the key to 21st century advancement) is not just given short shrift, but is ridiculed. Paris Hilton and Britney Spears are cultural icons. The average American watches television a mind-numbing 4 1/2 hours a day.
At the same time, our public school system is plagued with some of the highest dropout rates in the industrialized world. Math and science? Forget about it. Too tough for these TV watchers, or too boring, or whatever.
“When I compare our high schools with what I see when I’m traveling abroad,” said Bill Gates, “I am terrified for our work force of tomorrow.”
The point here is that as we approach the end of the first decade of the 21st century, the United States is in deep, deep trouble. Yet instead of looking for creative, 21st-century solutions to these enormous problems, too many of our so-called leaders are behaving like clowns, or worse — spouting garbage in the public sphere that hearkens back to the 1940s and ’50s.
Thoughtful, well-educated men and women are denounced as elites, and thus the enemies of ordinary Americans. Attempts to restore a semblance of fiscal sanity to a government that has been looted with an efficiency that would have been envied by the mob, are derided as subversive — the work of socialists, Marxists, Communists.
In 2008!
In North Carolina, Senator Elizabeth Dole, a conservative Republican, is in a tough fight for re-election against a Democratic state senator, Kay Hagan. So Ms. Dole ran a television ad that showed a close-up of Ms. Hagan’s face while the voice of a different woman asserts, “There is no God!”
Americans have to decide if they want a country that tolerates this kind of debased, backward behavior. Or if they want a country that aspires to true greatness — a country that stands for more than the mere rhetoric of equality, freedom, opportunity and justice.
That decision will require more than casting a vote in one presidential election. It will require a great deal of reflective thought and hard work by a committed citizenry. The great promise of America hinges on a government that works, openly and honestly, for the broad interests of the American people, as opposed to the narrow benefit of the favored, wealthy few.
By all means, vote today. But that is just the first step toward meaningful change.
Enjoy the day, and if this country manages to surprise me and enough of us vote for the future instead of not just the past, but a past of hundreds of years ago, we have five minutes to celebrate. But the barbarians are not leaving the gate with their pitchforks and torches. They are out there perfectly willing to burn people as witches and heretics, and they are not going to go quietly.
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