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Wednesday, November 5, 2008
Who does the GOP rally around?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
So, a question to the conservatives out there:
Who do you rally around now? McCain is defeated, Bush is discredited. Who is the party leader? Mitch McConnell? Really?
The folks at MSNBC posted this item at First Read:
NBC-WSJ GOP pollster Neil Newhouse did a post-election survey last night, and here’s what he found: Just 12% of those surveyed believed Palin should be the GOP’s new leader; instead 29% of voters said Romney, followed by 20% who say Huckabee. Among GOPers, it was Romney 33%, Huckabee 20% and Palin 18%.
Palin has considerable support here in Georgia, I suspect, where Romney’s Mormon background is a problem for evangelicals. But in exit polls, more than 60 percent of Americans said she wasn’t qualified to be president. She’s got a lot of work to do to repair that image, but it’s not impossible.
If I had to bet right now, I’d put my money on Bobby Jindal as the 2012 nominee. But he won’t begin to move in that direction for a while yet, leaving the national party leaderless and rudderless.
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Very nicely said…
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
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Voters protect personal privacy
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
In conservative South Dakota, John McCain beat Barack Obama by 10 points. It wasn’t even close. However, by that same 10-point margin, those same conservative South Dakota voters resoundedly defeated a ballot proposal that would have banned most abortions in the state. It wasn’t even close.
That was the second such rejection in two years by the people of South Dakota. In 2006, anti-abortion advocates explained away their defeat by saying their proposal went too far, banning abortion even in cases of rape and incest. This year’s version was less extreme, but the verdict was the same:
No.
In Colorado, home of James Dobson’s Focus on the Family, voters rejected a ballot proposal that would apply the legal status of “person” even to embryos. If approved, the measure would have given legal force to the claim that human life begins at conception.
It was defeated with 73 percent of the vote.
In Washington, voters overwhelmingly approved a law allowing doctor-assisted suicide for the terminally ill. The vote was 59 percent in favor, 41 percent opposed.
The American people are trying to send the Republican Party a message: Stay out of our personal lives. But the phone keeps on ringing and ringing and ringing….
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History was made, and they were part of it
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
As I was walking into the AJC building this morning, I saw people coming out the doors clutching several copies of this morning’s newspaper, with its banner headline “Historic win.”
The big surprise was inside the lobby, where people were lined up along the walls like voters at a polling place, waiting their turn for souvenirs of the occasion. Apparently the morning edition has been sold out all over the metro region as people rush to get a tangible reminder of an event they can tell their grandchildren about.
And the cool thing is, their grandchildren will probably wonder what the big fuss was about.
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This election had to be different, and was
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The American people have given President-elect Barack Obama more than a political victory; they have given him a resounding vote of confidence and a mandate of change. In fact, as the results rolled in from across the country Tuesday night, it was impossible to escape the conclusion that dramatic change is under way already, bubbling up from an American public deeply concerned about its nation’s future and demanding a new approach.
For all of his powers of persuasion, Obama did not create that call for change. But for reasons both obvious and subtle, he has come to personify it. When he is sworn into office Jan. 20, he will become not just our first African-American president, but the first to come of age in the years after Vietnam, Watergate, feminism, the civil rights movement and other old battles that in many ways have continued to rage to this day, like an underground fire smoldering for decades in an abandoned coal mine.
Obama’s opponents in this campaign wanted to keep fighting those earlier wars, in part because they knew how to win on that terrain. They had become adept at dividing the American people into almost equal halves, ensuring that the slightly larger half would be on their side. They believed that with Obama’s race, relative youth, background and name, surely it was possible to fight and win that kind of battle one more time.
But consistently, persistently, Obama insisted on looking forward. Like the American people, he understood that this election had to be different. He saw that while we argued about morals and values instead of government and competence, the future had been slowly slipping from us. Important decisions were ignored. Critical adjustments to a changing world were set aside. As a people and a nation, we were coasting on past accomplishments, trading on the good name, wealth and power built in earlier times.
As events from Wall Street to Main Street have made clear, that course is no longer open to us. Such pettiness is a luxury of easier days and smaller challenges.
In fact, no incoming president since Franklin Roosevelt has faced a more difficult situation than that confronting Obama. The combination of military challenges and financial and economic woes will require sacrifices of a sort not asked of the American people in a generation or longer.
That task will be complicated by the fallout from this bitter election season. Every campaign stirs anger and frustration, but the emotions in this election cycle have run deeper than most. While many saw in Obama a change for the better, others have seen him as a figure to be feared. The senator from Illinois has been villified as a Marxist, a socialist, a secret Muslim and friend of terrorists. His election has even been compared by conservative political commentators to Adolf Hitler’s assumption of power in 1933.
Such talk is dangerous and irresponsible, not least because to some minds it hints that the unjustifiable can perhaps be justified after all. Less dramatically, it also suggests that even with his margin of victory, Obama may not enjoy the presumption of unity and support traditionally granted to newly elected presidents. It seems remarkable to have to state such things, but it is important that the legitimacy of Obama’s presidency be acknowledged by even his most vociferous of critics if we are to make progress.
In a country as diverse as ours, unity can be a fragile commodity. In fact, perhaps the most famous and poign-ant cry for unity in American history was ignored with tragic consequences.
“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies,” Abraham Lincoln pleaded in his first inaugural address in 1861, on the eve of civil war. “Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”
In our current situation, though, the more relevant example may be that set by a candidate who suffered one of the more heartbreaking defeats in U.S. history. Eight years ago, Democrat Al Gore won a plurality of the popular vote but lost the presidency after an extended and bitter legal fight.
In his gracious concession speech, Gore took as a model the words of Sen. Stephen A. Douglas to Lincoln after the 1860 election. “Partisan feeling must yield to patriotism,” Douglas told Lincoln. “I’m with you, Mr. President, and God bless you.”
“I say to President-elect Bush that what remains of partisan rancor must now be put aside,” Gore said that night, “and may God bless his stewardship of this country. … I also accept my responsibility, which I will discharge unconditionally, to honor the new president-elect and do everything possible to help him bring Americans together in fulfillment of the great vision that our Declaration of Independence defines and that our Constitution affirms and defends.”
Sen. John McCain, an American patriot, expressed similar sentiments Tuesday night, describing Obama as his former opponent and as his president. That is the way real Americans do things, here in these United States of America.
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