Gather 'round, my children, and ye shall hear of the smiling dragon that was Barack Hussein Obama and whom neither John McCain nor his patron saint George could slay.
It started out so promisingly for poor John McCain. He won Kentucky's eight electoral votes, outstripping Barack Obama's modest three vote pickup in Vermont. Then it immediately starting going downhill. Obama began gobbling up votes faster than an ES&S touch screen. By 8-9 o'clock, McCain's campaign HQ in Phoenix looked like a vertical version of the aftermath at Jonestown. Rather than go through all those body bags, the Maricopa County Coroner's Office suggested burning the bodies where they stood.
Today, 55,000,000 Republicans are walking around in a daze, carpet fibers clinging to their raw, bleeding knuckles, scratching their addled heads and actually wondering why more of us didn't vote for their party. Furiously baffled as to why America slowly but surely is weeding out all the Republicans in our government.
The 2006 midterms, as it turns out, was merely a dress rehearsal for the massacre that transpired last night. The Republican Party, a flaming bag of dog shit ingraciously left on America's doorstep, was mercifully but firmly ground out and extinguished under the heel of Barack Obama's Reeboks.
Never a David vs Goliath matchup, it was nonetheless a 150 decibel wakeup call that a young, untested upstart could rise up from the Illinois Senate to the Oval Office in four short years, that said man could vastly appeal to over 60,000,000 Americans moreso than the tired old boy network that John McCain all too perfectly represented.
Think about that, people: From obscure state senator to President of the United States in four short years. It's a meteoric rise from relative ignominy to unparalleled prominence unlike any other in American history. And, as with George W. Bush's equally inexplicable and improbable rise, we have to ask ourselves not why McCain failed but how Obama had prevailed.
Barack Obama wasn't created by the media but recreated. Whether treated fairly or unfairly, Obama from the beginning of his national ascent has been like catnip to a media that have always been much more prone to report on minorities being the perpetrators (either alleged and/or fictional) than as victims or role models. Or political heroes.
Even when Frank Rich rightly told us about a year and a half ago that "Obama is not a magic elixir", our quasi-tabloid curiosity about Barack Obama, climaxing with last night's election, knows no bounds.
Is he black or white? Is he Christian or Muslim? Is he experienced enough or not? Is he patriotic or not? Boxers or briefs?
Is he like or unlike us?
And our inability to snugly pigeonhole him into one categorical box or another is the secret to our fascination with him. His multi-racial, multi-national, multi-religious heritage is a blessing to Democrats, a curse to Republicans. When Republicans, at the height of the pro-McCain/anti Obama frenzy, were asking us, "Who is Barack Obama and what does he stand for?", they were asking a fairer question than we'd like to admit.
Despite two bestselling books and a high profile job in the United States Senate, four years is generally not enough time for a country to get to know a person who could be the next leader of the free world. Poor Sarah Palin had only four weeks to get her shot in.
It's easy to see in the almost eponymous Barack Obama a piece of ourselves, whether it be the religions, races, nationalities, vocations, hobbies or ideologies that had shaped him into the man he is. It's not a stretch to say that President-elect Obama is an Everyman who appealed to so many because he could at least partially represent such a wide cross-section of American society as no statesman ever has.
I still don't know exactly for whom I voted last night. But, whoever or whatever he is, I hope that Obama has it within him to finally end this moral drought that has plagued this nation for eight consecutive years.
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