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The next President of the United States
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To the bitter end, still this never-ending argument between Reality and Dementia, between Compassion and Demonization, between Future and Past, and now Barack Obama really is the next President of the United States. Before I proceed to shine Mr. Obama's shoes, some words about his two opponents in this long campaign, from the primaries to the general election:
I'm one of those liberals that fell for John McCain in 2000. For a very brief period during the primaries that year, McCain made a lot of young people believe in service and ideals again. That is no small achievement. And I always liked Hillary Clinton during her husband's presidency, she fought hard for health care and education. I remember back in 1997, after Oliver McCall started crying and quit in the middle of his heavyweight title fight against Lennox Lewis, Don Imus went on the air the next morning and said, "Jesus, get back in there you bastard, we've got a first lady with more balls than you." I loved that, and I was always proud of how she handled herself during the Monica Lewinsky mess, especially when she went on to win her own senate seat.
But then in 2003, both McCain and Hillary not only fell for, but became head cheerleaders for this insane stalemate in Iraq. They were using the lives of American soldiers as political poker chips, and I haven't forgiven them for it. I probably never will, especially after the way they conducted themselves in their campaigns against Obama. You only get what you give.
As it turned out, Hillary's shrieking hysterics and McCain's obvious disrespect for Obama during the debates only made Obama look better. There were countless times when his opponents would sneak in some cheap shot, making Obama's supporters want to lunge through their television screens and punch somebody, while Obama just stayed calm and made his argument. To borrow a line from David Mamet, Barack Obama stays so cool that when he goes to sleep, sheep count him.
So how did he do it? Besides running a near-perfect campaign, that is? Two words: Young Voters. They didn't just vote in better numbers than they have in quite some time, they volunteered. They quit their jobs and moved to swing states to work for Obama's campaign. They finally swung an election.
Politicians have a steep hill to climb when it comes to young voters: my generation has been marketed and lied to so ruthlessly that we are very hard to inspire in large numbers. We find most modern politicians depressing (see: Lieberman, Joe) partly because of the type of people who run for office. So many of them remind us of the kids in high school who ran for student council: preppy, authority-worshipping and ambitious to the point of barely seeming human.
Barack Obama overcame all of that with his most underrated virtue: his sense of humor. Whether mocking Hillary Clinton's newfound love of guns before the Pennsylvania primary ("Who does she think she is, Annie Oakley? C'mon!") or poking fun at his shared bloodline with Dick Cheney ("When you do these genealogy studies, you want to find out that you're related to Abe Lincoln or Willie Mays. But Dick Cheney?"), Obama made us laugh. Sure, he was president of the Harvard Law Review, and his associations with people like Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers prove that he has no shortage of ruthless ambition. But the guy made us laugh... sometimes, it's really that simple.
When you keep a smile on your face day after dreary day on the campaign trail, you make it very hard for establishment candidates to drag you down into the mud, which always disillusions young voters. Al Gore and George W. Bush both took advantage of this in their primaries in 2000, going negative very early on and turning off young voters who might have put Bill Bradley or John McCain over the top. John Kerry did it to Howard Dean, Hillary tried it with Obama.
Establishment candidates go negative because they know it helps them capitalize on the first lesson you learn in junior high civics class: there's no such thing as not voting. If you allow yourself to get turned off by politics and stay at home doing bong hits and watching Tila Tequila instead of going to the polls, you are tacitly voting for the entrenched establishment that you despise. This is how mediocrity (and worse) always seems to rise to the top in our political system, and until this year, I never thought that would change.
But now the same system that twice elected George W. Bush to the highest office in the land just elected an inspiring, self-made black man named Barack Obama to that same office. And look at him up there on that stage. Really, look at that.
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