Obama's One-Term Presidency

My friend Chris McClure, blogging at the home page of U.S. Senator John Cornyn, makes an interesting point on the conflict between sound fiscal policies and demands for large domestic spending increases:

When social engineering agendas drive the legislative process, we see an imbalance enter into fiscal policy. Such imbalances can overload the ability of monetary policy to make corrections and keep the economy functioning properly. Over time, continued pressure for sustained economic growth while creating an overburden of debt, creates a situation in which significant corrections must occur. When such corrections are further influenced by corrupt practices and insufficient oversight, significant economic turmoil will be the result ....

The social agenda espoused by the Democratic Party, coupled with the re-distributive schemes of their nominee for the Presidency [now President-Elect], would cause dire consequences to our economy if enacted. The solution to our current woes is to shift spending away from an inefficient government and into the hands of the people who earned it. Government should return to the role of oversight and policy rather than attempting to nationalize our financial institutions.

Taking this further, James Pethokoukis argues that the economic crisis is so severe that Americans may not see much improvement in their finances over the next four years. Thus, it's quite possible that voters will grow tired of the "Obama malaise," and return the GOP to power:

That's right, the "O" in "Obama" may stand for "One Term." For starters, there's a strong chance that when voters head to the polls on Nov. 2, 2010, they likely will still think the economy is awful. Not much debate about that. (Good chance the Democrats' two-election winning streak comes to an end.) And while voters may be somewhat patient for two years, patient for four years? Really unlikely. If history is any guide at all, voters may still be terribly cranky about the economy when they cast their ballots on Nov. 6, 2012 and thus likely choose the 45th president of the United States -- be it Mitt Romney, Sarah Palin, Bobby Jindal or some other Republican without "Bush" for a last name. Once again a "change" election for an impatient America. The same bad economy that doomed John McCain in 2008 will have sunk Obama, as well.

Here's the political and economic math: Let's assume the current downturn turns out to be as painful as the 1990-91 recession. It's an apt comparison. As Minneapolis Federal Reserve President Gary Stern said earlier this year," The situation we confront today is reminiscent, in several salient ways, of the headwinds environment that prevailed in the aftermath of the 1990-91 recession."

Among those "headwinds" Stern referred to: an imploding real estate bubble, a construction bust, a banking crisis, and a credit crunch. Sound familiar? The nation's gross domestic product fell 3.0 percent in the fourth quarter of 1990 and 2.0 percent in the first quarter of 1991. But even after the economy started expanding again, the unemployment rate kept rising until it hit 7.8 percent in June of 1992 vs. a low of 5.2 percent in June 1990. Recall that in January of 1992, President Bush, running for reelection, told New Hampshire voters that the economy was in "free fall" even though the economy was later shown to have grown at a robust 4.2 percent during the first quarter of that year.

See, it takes a while for people to really perceive that an economy has turned around, especially if unemployment is high. Bill Clinton won the 1992 election on the economy ("it's the economy, stupid") even though GDP had been growing for six full quarters. According to Gallup, 88 percent of Americans thought the economy was "fair" or "poor" in October 1992 with some 60 percent saying the economy was "getting worse." Two years later, it was the Democrats turn to feel the brunt of widespread economic anxiety as the Republicans captured both the House and the Senate. Even though the economy had then been growing for 14 straight quarters and the unemployment rate was down to 5.8 percent, 72 percent of Americans still thought the economy was "fair" or "poor" and 66 percent though the nation was headed in the wrong direction.

That's right 3 1/2 years after the 1990-91 recession ended, the economy was still weighing negatively on voters and hurting the incumbent political party. Is it so hard to imagine, then, that three or four years from now voters will also be unhappy about the state of the economy and blame the party in power, the Obamacrats?

Paul Krugman proposed a range of New-New Deal economic and spending policies in yesterday's New York Times.

Name your Democratic Party big-government spending boondoggle, and it's there. Recall, of course, that by May 1939, Franklin Roosevelt's Treasury Secretary, Henry Morgenthau, was complaining, "We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work." Likewise, this year's fiscal stimulus tax rebate checks did nothing to slow the economy's slide toward recession.

Government can reform current regulatory institutions to eliminate corruption, and put a floor under collapsing credit markets; and government can keep taxes low to allow families to keep more of their own earnings and stimulate small-business expansion. But what we're seeing from the radical leftosphere, progressive party activists, and liberal media pundits is a gargantuan push for massive spending entitlements that will put both the New Deal and the Great Society to shame.

Leftist Ahistoricism Rehabilitates Bill Ayers

The economic crisis was the overriding electoral issue that propelled Barack Obama to the White House. Next to economic collapse, Obama's personification of racial change and oratorical uplift fueled a once-in-a-lifetime presidential campaign. With public opinion increasingly validating the GOP's claims of success in Iraq, the most important national security issue was off the table by fall 2008.

John McCain sought to convince the American people of the drastically unconvential background and character of "The One," but to no avail: The degree of crisis in the nation was more compelling than the irrefutable fact that the Democratic nominee was raised from an early age in radicalism, with Marxist mentors and Weatherground associates who worked closely with the Illinois Democrat to distribute million of dollars to hardcore activists and shake-down artists across Chicago's corrupt Democratic Party machine.

With the election, the left has been proclaiming the current era a "Democratic realignment" and a "progressive mandate for radical change."

While the many are focused today on the news that Barack Obama leaked his private conversation yesterday with President Bush to the press - which is seen as an effort to preemptively undermine the remaining days of the Bush administration - lower-level apparatchiks are continuing work on the propaganda campaign that charactized the netroots and leftist media's whitewashing of the Democratic nominee's opposition ideology and far-reaching radical ties.

Not only is ACORN now a "mainstream" group, but the unrepentent terrorist actions and ideology of William Ayers is being written off as a relic of the 1960s, according to this hard-left nihilist blogger:

... the whole attack on Ayers was absurd ...

And for as much as the attacks were vile, they were idiotic for the very reasons Ayers pointed out. The 60's are over. For a lot of people, the 60's are nothing but a mythical creation of the past. But they don't hold a real bond or message anymore. Even for the people who were there, it was forty years ago. Focusing on the events of 1968 to guide us is like people in that year focusing on the events of 1928 to guide them. It's absurd. It's laughable. It's stupid. And it was a large part of McCain's argument for why he should be president. What an idiot!

To understand this mindset is to understand the thinking of today's contemporary left. There are no real threats to American security; it's all manufactured fear. The campaign of domestic terror in the 1960s? It was all a giant misunderstanding: No one would get hurt. Yes, yes, brother! ... the Weather Underground is simply a relic of some mythical past, and deranged dog-whistle Republicans have been shown as hopelessly out of touch with the post-partisan zeitgeist embodied in the cult of Obamology.

William Ayers was a revolutionary terrorist in the 1960s. He never disavowed his campaign of violence against the country (indeed,he wished he could have done more), and he still uses his Weatherman days as a pedogogical tool to indoctrinate students to the glories of the anti-American, anti-imperialist movement.

We can look forward to more of this totalitarian revisionism in the year ahead.

The Obama Moment: Have We Overcome?

Jon Meacham's essay at Newsweek, "The Age of Obama," includes this interesting passsage:

A nation whose Constitution enshrined slavery has elected an African-American president within living memory of days when blacks were denied fundamental human rights—including the right to vote. Hyperbole around elections comes easy and cheap, but this is a moment—a year—when even superlatives cannot capture the magnitude of the change that the country voted for last Tuesday. "If there is anyone out there who doubts that America is a place where all things are possible; who still wonders if the dream of our Founders is alive in our time; who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer," Obama told an adoring yet serious throng in Chicago's Grant Park. He alluded to the historic nature of the victory only indirectly. "This election had many firsts and many stories that will be told for generations," he said. He did not need, really, to add anything to that: that he was saying the words was testament enough.

One of the most interesting questions going forward is: "Have we overcome"? Or, well ... can Michelle Obama now really be proud of her country?

I think so, but then the left won't have anything to rail against.

Hate Campaign Targets Churches in Prop 8 Aftermath

A radical left-wing protest group infiltrated Mount Hope Church in Lansing, Michigan, on Sunday.

The protesters, clad with pink scarves and carrying hatchet and sledgedhammers, stormed the church, yelling epithets and militant gay pride slogans:

The group also handed out fliers ....

“We specialize in confronting homophobia, transphobia and every and all other forms of oppression,” the fliers read. “We strive for the liberation of all people.”

Well, actually, here's this summary of the church's mission statement:

Mount Hope, for the record, is an evangelical, bible believing church whose members provide free 24 hour counseling, prayer lines, catastrophic care for families dealing with medical emergencies, support groups for men, women and children dealing with a wide variety of life's troubles, crisis intervention, marriage ministries, regular, organized volunteer work in and around the city, missions in dozens of countries across the globe, a construction ministry that has built over 100 churches, schools, orphanages and other projects all over the world and an in-depth prison ministry that reaches out, touches and helps the men and women the rest of society fears the most. They also teach respect for all human life and the Biblical sanctity of marriage as an institution between one man and one woman.

Meanwhile, bloggers, gay rights activists, and neo-Stalinist organizations have organized a boycott against the state of Utah, in response to the Mormon Church's sponsorship of California's Proposition 8.

As hard left blog-ringleader John Aravosis wrote earlier:

The Mormon Church has a long history of trying to forcefully impose its will, its religion, on others. Over the next few weeks and months, we're going to educate America about those efforts.

Uncoded, this means simply that the left plans an unprecedented campaign of hate and intolerance against a group that exercised its First Amendment rights to support a cause in which it believed.

Meanwhile, watch this video of Keith Olbermann, especially the passage at 2:30 minutes where Olbermann equates laws preserving traditional marriage with the enslavement of black Americans:

This is the sickest exploitation of the struggle for black equality I've ever seen.

As I've written before, same-sex marriage is not a civil right, and leftists push a false analogy when they compare African American civil rights to the creation of a gay marriage right.

As I've also noted, the developments this last week are demonstrating a new cultural war speading across the land. And as disgusting is the left's campaign of intolerance against a majority of traditional Americans, the inevitable backlash will set back whatever legitimate policy movement toward recognizing same-sex marriage in this country.

A Qualitative Realignment

About a month ago I asked, "Will 2008 Be a Critical Election?"

In terms of pure numbers across the separation of powers (the GOP will maintain the minority's filibuster power in the Senate), I don't think Barack Obama's electoral victory constitutes the sweeping political earthquake that the concept of a critical realignment implies (see Jay Cost's detailed examination of the question: "Is 2008 a Realignment?").

That said, the more I read and reflect on the genuine change coming to America in an Obama administration, it's clear we've no doubt witnessed what might be termed a "qualitative realignment," meaning that the philosophical sensibilities of the electorate have be so transformed that the election signifies an undeniable and lasting break with the past.

George Packer, at the New Yorker, captures the essence of this qualitative realignment:

Barack Obama’s decisive defeat of John McCain is the most important victory of a Democratic candidate since 1932. It brings to a close another conservative era, one that rose amid the ashes of the New Deal coalition in the late sixties, consolidated its power with the election of Ronald Reagan, in 1980, and immolated itself during the Presidency of George W. Bush. Obama will enter the White House at a moment of economic crisis worse than anything the nation has seen since the Great Depression; the old assumptions of free-market fundamentalism have, like a charlatan’s incantations, failed to work, and the need for some “new machinery” is painfully obvious. But what philosophy of government will characterize it?

The answer was given three days before the election by a soldier and memoirist of the Reagan revolution, Peggy Noonan, who wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “Something new is happening in America. It is the imminent arrival of a new liberal moment.” The Journal’s editorial page anticipated with dread “one of the most profound political and ideological shifts in U.S. history. Liberals would dominate the entire government in a way they haven’t since 1965, or 1933. In other words, the election would mark the restoration of the activist government that fell out of public favor in the 1970s.” The Journal’s nightmare scenario of America under President Obama and a Democratic Congress included health care for all, a green revolution, expanded voting rights, due process for terror suspects, more powerful unions, financial regulation, and a shift of the tax burden upward. (If the editorial had had more space, full employment and the conquest of disease might have made the list.)

For the first time since the Johnson Administration, the idea that government should take bold action to create equal opportunity for all citizens doesn’t have to explain itself in a defensive mumble. That idea is ascendant in 2008 because it answers the times. These political circumstances, even more than the election of the first black American to the highest office, make Obama’s victory historic. Whether his Presidency will be transformative, in the manner of Roosevelt and the handful of predecessors named by F.D.R. in 1932, will depend, in part, on history—it’s unclear whether today’s financial troubles will offer a political challenge, and an opportunity, of the magnitude of the Great Depression. But the power of Obama’s Presidency will ultimately hinge on how he chooses to interpret the “modern application” of liberalism in the twenty-first century.

That's probably about as well as it can be said, without sounding full of hubris and spite. As always, we'll really know if 2008 was a realignment in the years ahead, because the theory's essentially "retrodictive" in its explanatory foundations.

Obama and the Pro-Life Vote

Ross Douthat's been doing some writing on the shape of abortion politics under a Barack Obama administration. One particular project he's got going is a slap-down campaign against Douglas Kmiec, the pro-life Catholic law professor and Obama advisor who made a name for himself during the campaing by arguing that pro-lifers should back the Democratic nominee.

It's worth checking Douthat's links, but I like this part on why Kmiec should be given no slack:

Look, there are a variety of not-unreasonable ways for Americans who believe the unborn deserve legal protection to justify a vote for Barack Obama. But to claim that a candidate who seems primed to begin disbursing taxpayer dollars in support of abortion and embryo-destructive research as soon as he enters the White House somehow represented the better choice for anti-abortion Americans on anti-abortion grounds is an argument that deserves to met, not with engagement, but with contempt.

In another post Douthat links to Damon Linker, who makes an encouraging point in a piece at the New Republic:

Consider the voting patterns of the roughly 26 percent of Americans who describe themselves as white evangelical/born again Protestants. Early exit polls compiled by Steven Waldman at Beliefnet show that John McCain won these voters by a margin of 74 percent to 25 percent. That's down somewhat from Bush's record 78 percent in 2004, but still considerably higher than the number of evangelical votes Bush himself managed to win in 2000 (68 percent). That Obama, who aggressively courted these voters with religious appeals, fell five points short of Al Gore's 30 percent showing among evangelicals in 2000 must be judged a disappointment.

Here's the clincher:

As long as the Democratic Party continues to take its cues on social policy from those who refuse any compromise on abortion, it will give the Republicans the gift that keeps on giving: a large, stable, immensely loyal bloc of voters passionately committed to protecting (as they see it) innocent human life from lethal violence and those who champion the right to inflict it. For the moment, there aren't enough of these voters to get the GOP to victory. But there are more than enough of them to ensure that the Republicans will begin their efforts to reconstitute a winning coalition from a position of relative strength, with millions of motivated foot soldiers dedicated to the struggle ahead.

Suffice to say that for all of Obama's success in winning the lion's share of demographic constituencies, the numbers of the GOP share of the religiouis conservatives is a heartening sign for upcoming election cycles.

Schwarzenegger Model is Disaster for GOP

Marvin King, a political scientist who blogs at King Politics, published an interesting essay Sunday at the Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, Mississippi: "A Shrinking GOP Needs Plans for a 'Comeback'."

Marvin suggests three routes for a GOP comeback: A "Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee" path; the "Grover Norquist/Club for Growth" path; and a route that "goes west," that is, a move "in the direction of Arnold Schwarzenegger":

While the California governor can never run for president, he epitomizes the moderate wing of the Republican Party, and a template for winning in Blue America. Schwarzenegger works with unions and business alike in trying to create a pro-business climate.

Likewise, he avoids divisive social issues. Not because he does not care; instead, he recognizes that a single-minded focus on social issues is not conducive to developing a bipartisan working environment. He is not as conservative fiscally as Norquist, nor as conservative socially as Palin, but Arnold knows how to win elections.

I've written previously that the GOP has a demographic problem and will need to appeal to the political center in future elections, but the "Schwarzenegger path" is not what I had in mind. The best evidence of this is today's news that Governor Schwarzenegger has announced his support for the same-sex marriage activists who are currently mounting statewide protests against Proposition 8. As today's Los Angeles Times reports:

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Sunday expressed hope that the California Supreme Court would overturn Proposition 8, the ballot initiative that outlawed same-sex marriage.

I can't stress this point enough: While there are a number of things the GOP must do to claw its way back to power, capitulating to the angry mobs storming the barricades to overturn the vote of a traditional California majority is not one of them.

Seventy-percent of black voters in the state supported Proposition 8, and this is California, a bastion of progressive politics and Democratic Party hegemony. Governor Scharzenegger's a dramatic exception to the rule, and for Republicans to seek a "Schwarzenegger model" at the national level will likely mean the literal break-up of the post-Goldwater GOP coalition. Simply put: Some combination of social policy conservativism with innovative economic policies attractive to the stressed middle class will be the ticket to a revived conservatism.

At the presidential level, Barack Obama took every single demographic category except voters older than 60 years-old and white voters over the age of 30. That's it. Frankly, 2008 heralds a demographic realignment to the Democratic Party. Whether this vast bloc coalesces to resemble Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal Coaltion - which endured well into the 1960s - remains to be seen. It's almost certain, however, that Republicans won't be able to win social moderates by aping the interest group liberalism of the Democratic-left.

Note something else about the electoral demographics of Propostion 8 in California: Jasmyne Cannick, an urban civil rights activist in Los Angeles, argues that opposition to Proposition 8 was dominated by affluent white liberals indifferent to the real needs of African Americans - needs which include jobs, safe streets and schools, and remedies to continuing inequalities ("driving while black"). Moreover, the black Yes on 8 vote was grounded in the social justice and spiritual meaning that marks the religion of the black church. That faith-based motivation is naturally antithetical to the secular humanism that drives the left-wing agenda of today's Democratic Party.

Then there's the Latino vote this year: Nationally, Latinos formed the crucial bloc of voters in key states like Colorado, New Mexico, and Virginia. Colorado and Virginia have turned out reliably for the Republican Party for decades, and there's nothing that's particularly permanent about Latino support for the Democrats this year. In 2004, George W. Bush took roughly 44 percent of the national Latino vote, and in states like Texas, the GOP ticket secured a whopping 59 percent of the Latino electorate. This year, John McCain took just 31 percent of the Latino vote nationally, down almost 15 points from the GOP's share of that demographic in 2004.

Yet, there's a large Protestant and Catholic bloc of Latino voters who are attentive to the political and cultural attractions of the Republican Party. Perhaps the most careless and self-destructive agenda for the GOP going forward will be to further alienate the country's Latino voting constituency.

As Scott Rasmussen reports today, public opinion polling shows that 55 percent of Americans believe that tax cuts are good for the economy, and Rasmussen notes that Barack Obama won the presidency by promising tax cuts for 95 percent of Americans. The problem for an Obama administration is that the Democratic Congress hopes to spend billions of dollars on social programs and infrastructure - a new Works Progress Administration is being proposed - while maintaining the deployment of American troops in two ongoing conflicts abroad.

Financing such an agenda will likely require an increase in tax rates beyond the top, high-income marginal hikes already proposed by the Obama campaign. Combine this with the super-progressive social agenda the marks today's Democratic Party, and we can see the contours of a conservative opposition-paradigm taking shape.

In all likelihood, the Schwarzenegger model will be the least attractive program for the emerging post-2008 GOP. A more serious challenge will be to find an alliance of conservative activists among the Palin-Huckabee factions and the Club for Growth cohorts that offers an atttractive economic model while not alienating racial and religious moderates and the fast-growing demographic groups likely key to a Republican Party resurgence.

Transgendered Children

Well, we've seen some heated debate on cultural values here the last couple of days. So, perhaps readers might wrap their minds around the Atlantic's disturbing story on the debate over transgendered children and the crisis of parental indulgence in cultural decay and political correctness:

It took the gay-rights movement 30 years to shift from the Stonewall riots to gay marriage; now its transgender wing, long considered the most subversive, is striving for suburban normalcy too. The change is fuel‑ed mostly by a community of parents who, like many parents of this generation, are open to letting even preschool children define their own needs. Faced with skeptical neighbors and school officials, parents at the conference discussed how to use the kind of quasi-therapeutic language that, these days, inspires deference: tell the school the child has a “medical condition” or a “hormonal imbalance” that can be treated later, suggested a conference speaker, Kim Pearson; using terms like gender-­identity disorder or birth defect would be going too far, she advised. The point was to take the situation out of the realm of deep pathology or mental illness, while at the same time separating it from voluntary behavior, and to put it into the idiom of garden-variety “challenge.” As one father told me, “Between all the kids with language problems and learning disabilities and peanut allergies, the school doesn’t know who to worry about first” ....

In 1967, Dr. John Money launched an experiment that he thought might confirm some of the more radical ideas emerging in feminist thought. Throughout the ’60s, writers such as Betty Friedan were challenging the notion that women should be limited to their prescribed roles as wives, housekeepers, and mothers. But other feminists pushed further, arguing that the whole notion of gender was a social construction, and easy to manipulate. In a 1955 paper, Money had written: “Sexual behavior and orientation as male or female does not have an innate, instinctive basis.” We learn whether we are male or female “in the course of the various experiences of growing up.” By the ’60s, he was well-known for having established the first American clinic to perform voluntary sex-change operations, at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, in Baltimore. One day, he got a letter from the parents of infant twin boys, one of whom had suffered a botched circumcision that had burned off most of his penis.

Money saw the case as a perfect test for his theory. He encouraged the parents to have the boy, David Reimer, fully castrated and then to raise him as a girl. When the child reached puberty, Money told them, doctors could construct a vagina and give him feminizing hormones. Above all, he told them, they must not waver in their decision and must not tell the boy about the accident.

In paper after paper, Money reported on Reimer’s fabulous progress, writing that “she” showed an avid interest in dolls and dollhouses, that she preferred dresses, hair ribbons, and frilly blouses. Money’s description of the child in his book Sexual Signatures prompted one reviewer to describe her as “sailing contentedly through childhood as a genuine girl.” Time magazine concluded that the Reimer case cast doubt on the belief that sex differences are “immutably set by the genes at conception.”

The reality was quite different, as Rolling Stone reporter John Colapinto brilliantly documented in the 2000 best seller As Nature Made Him. Reimer had never adjusted to being a girl at all. He wanted only to build forts and play with his brother’s dump trucks, and insisted that he should pee standing up. He was a social disaster at school, beating up other kids and misbehaving in class. At 14, Reimer became so alienated and depressed that his parents finally told him the truth about his birth, at which point he felt mostly relief, he reported. He eventually underwent phalloplasty, and he married a woman. Then four years ago, at age 38, Reimer shot himself dead in a grocery-store parking lot.

Today, the notion that gender is purely a social construction seems nearly as outmoded as bra-burning or free love. Feminist theory is pivoting with the rest of the culture, and is locating the key to identity in genetics and the workings of the brain. In the new conventional wisdom, we are all pre-wired for many things previously thought to be in the realm of upbringing, choice, or subjective experience: happiness, religious awakening, cheating, a love of chocolate. Behaviors are fundamental unless we are chemically altered. Louann Brizendine, in her 2006 best-selling book, The Female Brain, claims that everything from empathy to chattiness to poor spatial reasoning is “hardwired into the brains of women.” Dr. Milton Diamond, an expert on human sexuality at the University of Hawaii and long the intellectual nemesis of Money, encapsulated this view in an interview on the BBC in 1980, when it was becoming clear that Money’s experiment was failing: “Maybe we really have to think … that we don’t come to this world neutral; that we come to this world with some degree of maleness and femaleness which will transcend whatever the society wants to put into [us].”

Readers should spend time with the whole thing, here.

Oh Graciousness! No Sympathy for a Not-So-Good Man

Readers may recall my election night post, "What's Puzzling You is the Nature of My Game..."

There I suggested that folks give President-Elect Obama "some sympathy" and that we "must pay due penitence for the sins" of our fathers, our white fathers.

That didn't go over too well with some folks on the left, who attacked and ridiculed my essay as outside the bounds of propriety.

Naturally, I have no regrets whatsover, and I'm returning to this meme in light of some essays debating how "gracious" conservatives should be in treating "The One."

Patterico, for example, wrote last week what I thought was a strange post at the time, "Obama: A Flawed But Good Man Who Has Made Bad Decisions And Will Make More."

Sure, while I understand the need for conservatives to accept defeat with honor, there's something about Obama's victory that was fundamentally dishonest, if not sinister, and I don't believe that President-Elect Obama has any reservoir of "truth capital" that entitles him to particularly gracious treatment from those on the right. In contrast, some argue that John McCain's own ennobled graciousness cost him the election, sadly enough.

In any case, Jeff Goldstein took exception to Patterico's claim that Barack Obama's "a good but flawed man":

In [a] political environment wherein the left has managed to turn the introduction of inconvenient facts into “smears” or “racism,” this willingness, on the part of some conservatives, to believe themselves capable of seizing the moral high ground by essentially giving cover to the demonstrably bad by allowing that it is merely “misguided,” is yet another step toward the very kind of partisan pragmatism that has cost Republicans so dearly, and that, even more troubling, has served to devalue language and further institutionalize a dangerous idea of how interpretation works....

It matters who gets called a “good man.” It matters who we say has this country’s best interests at heart. And yes, it’s possible Obama does, to a certain extent — though what is important to recognize is that, at least so far as his governing principles to this point suggest, he doesn’t hold that view from the perspective of the country as it was founded, and as it was intended to be governed.

Which means that Obama’s best interests for the country are really the best interests for a country he’d like to see this one become — a new text that he’d like us to believe will be but an re-interpretation of the original text.

As someone who believes in the principles upon which this country was founded, I refuse to allow that someone whose ideological predispositions compel him to radically redefine that “imperfect document” that is the Constitution, has this country’s best interests at heart.

And I likewise refuse to allow that a man whose thuggish deeds and unsavory associations have defined him be granted the honor of “good man.” Because to do so is to make a mockery of good men, and to cede yet another bit of our ability to evaluate and describe and conclude in good faith into a bit of “hate speech” that won’t help the GOP regain power.

This I refuse as well, although I've made case with a bit less post-structural analytical methodology.

I've simply said, "Fight with Me ... Fight for what's right for our country!", borrowing, perhaps ironically, even tragically, from our erstwhile yet too gracious GOP nominee, and now applying it to the ideological and moral challenges ahead.

GOP Prepares for New Culture War

One of the most interesting electoral outcomes last Tuesday was the passage in Arkansas of a ballot measure prohibiting the adoption of children by unmarried couples. The underlying goal of the initiative was to prevent homosexual couples from raising children in the state.

What's especially interesting is the title of the piece, "Antipathy Toward Obama Seen as Helping Arkansas Limit Adoption." While I think this particular measure goes too far in restricting the rights of average citizens who may be unmarried with children, the Arkansas vote is a powerful case in the emerging culture war in the states following the election of Barack Obama to the White House. Recall, as well, the intense protests against Proposition 8 in California, which is a radical push to redefine the traditional meaning of marriage.

On Fox News this morning, Representative Mike Pence made the case that the way back for the GOP is through traditional conservatism, arguing for the "time-honored principles of limited government, a belief in free markets, in the sanctity of life, the sanctity of marriage":

There's lots of evidence that the culture war is real and building, and one of Obama's greatest challenges ahead will be to let the air out of his messianic rise to power without fomenting a real backlash among his uncleansed hordes of supporters and their pent-up demands for radical change.

Interestingly, just today Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan delivered a major addresss to usher in the new administration, "America's New Beginning: President-elect Barack Obama." Meanwhile, some Democratic Party activists are lobbying to promote a national holiday for Barack Obama.

Yep, that culture war's kicking before we've even had the inauguration.

Gay Marriage Protest is Tactic of Anti-American Movement

The Los Angeles Times reports today that the neo-Stalinist protest organization, International ANSWER, is a key sponsor of the ongoing radical protests against California's Proposition 8:

More than 20,000 protesters spilled into the streets of Los Angeles, San Diego, Sacramento and even Modesto on Saturday in mostly peaceful demonstrations over passage of Proposition 8, the statewide ballot measure that bans same-sex marriage.

The unfolding street scenes underscored the racial and religious tensions that have surfaced since Tuesday's vote threw into question the legality of 18,000 marriages of gay and lesbian couples and foreclosed the option for any more.

Police estimated that 12,500 boisterous marchers converged about 6 p.m. at Sunset and Santa Monica boulevards in Silver Lake near the site of the former Black Cat bar, which the city recently designated a historic-cultural monument for its '60s role as home of the local gay rights movement....

The Silver Lake rally began with fiery speeches from the bed of a pickup.

Among the speakers was Robin Tyler, half of the lesbian couple who were denied a marriage license in 2004 and challenged that rejection all the way to the California Supreme Court.

The pair married after the court cleared the way for gay weddings, but the legal status of such marriages is now uncertain.

Tyler expressed frustration over the leadership of the unsuccessful campaign to defeat the ballot measure and lashed out at those who supported it.

"The No on 8 people didn't want us to use the word 'bigots.' But that's what they are, bigots, bigots, bigots," Tyler said, bringing a round of cheers from the growing crowd. "We will never be made invisible again. Never again will we let them define who we are."

The march's organizers, the L.A. Coalition for Equal Marriage Rights and the Answer Coalition, did not apply for a permit, police said.

Of course ANSWER sponsored an illegal protest: These people are hardcore revolutionaries seeking the ultimate destruction of the American state.

The intense vitriol we've seen in the various photo images of the protests, as well as the attacks on black Americans standing in the way of the revolutionary agenda, demonstrate that the gay rights radical movement is not about building cross-cultural and multi-ethnic alliances, but is rather part of the "struggle" against the imperial hegemony of the privileged classes.

We've seen the frontlines of the new culture war take to the streets this past week. The tide is turning in this country, and some in the GOP are arguing that the road back to power lies along the landing grounds of traditional culture.

Wave Goodbye to American Exceptionalism

I've said so much many times (here and here, for example), but don't miss Peter Hitchens' comment on the reaction to Barack Obama's election across America's multicultural street:

I was in Washington DC the night of the election....

As I walked, I crossed another of Washington’s secret frontiers. There had been a few white people blowing car horns and shouting, as the result became clear. But among the Mexicans, Salvadorans and the other Third World nationalities, there was something like ecstasy.

They grasped the real significance of this moment. They knew it meant that America had finally switched sides in a global cultural war. Forget the Cold War, or even the Iraq War. The United States, having for the most part a deeply conservative people, had until now just about stood out against many of the mistakes which have ruined so much of the rest of the world.

Suspicious of welfare addiction, feeble justice and high taxes, totally committed to preserving its own national sovereignty, unabashedly Christian in a world part secular and part Muslim, suspicious of the Great Global Warming panic, it was unique.

These strengths had been fading for some time, mainly due to poorly controlled mass immigration and to the march of political correctness. They had also been weakened by the failure of America’s conservative party – the Republicans – to fight on the cultural and moral fronts.

They preferred to posture on the world stage. Scared of confronting Left-wing teachers and sexual revolutionaries at home, they could order soldiers to be brave on their behalf in far-off deserts. And now the US, like Britain before it, has begun the long slow descent into the Third World. How sad. Where now is our last best hope on Earth?

From Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Hugo Chavez to the new PLO ("Palestians Love Obama"), the Wretched of the Earth are ready for a "chance for change."

Michelle Obama's Affirmative Action Style

Today's Los Angeles Times showcases Michelle Obama's fashion sense, which is described as reflecting "the American-led democratization of fashion..."

But what stood out in the photo gallery is this photo of a (ostensible) Secret Service officer escorting Mrs. Obama through the crowds:

I have no clue as to the bureaucratic decision-rules on the assignment of Secret Service personnel to the candidates and their wives. But given that Michelle Obama will be the most race-conscious first lady in American history, one can't dismiss the notion that she lobbied - even demanded - for black officers to dominate her security contingent.

As Linda Chavez pointed out last summer:

Michelle Obama’s life is a case study in affirmative action....

At every step of her career, race has been central to her own identification and upward mobility. Judging from the quality of thinking and writing exhibited in her Princeton thesis, Michelle would not likely have been admitted to Princeton (and later Harvard Law) had she been white. And of course affirmative action opened up jobs, first in a prestigious law firm and later as the vice president of community affairs at the University of Chicago medical center-earning $300,000 a year. She made it her first task at the hospital to steer more contracts to minority contractors. “She revised the contracting system, sending so much business to firms owned by women and other minorities that the hospital won awards,” the Times says.

Perhaps Mrs. Obama used her muscle (and her husband's electoral inevitability) to steer minority officers to her security detail, to add some street authenticity and send a message that race preferences will get an open house at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

(Note: This could be a local police officer, so I have no idea as to the official position of the agent escorting Mrs. Obama. The post here simply assesses the logical implications of the situation in the photograph, considering Mrs. Obama's race-conscious ideology, and extrapolates to the future demographic composition of the First Lady-Elect's Secret Service detail).

Out of the Wilderness: Conservative Comeback Awaits

In the weeks leading up to the conclusion of the 2008 campaign, a number of bloggers predicted an Obama victory, and many started planning ahead for the long road to a conservative comeback.

I discounted such talk, for example, in my post, "McCain's Path to the White House."

In that entry, I cited Robert Stacy McCain, "The Other McCain," and his essay, "How John McCain Lost." Robert pegged September 24 - the day John McCain suspended his campaign to return to Washington to work on the Wall Street rescue - as the beginning of the end for the Arizona Senator.

In response, after providing an analysis of the Electoral College projections, I suggested:

The election's still close.

McCain needs to focus his core message now more that ever, hammering his ace cards of experience, accurate instincts on the economy, and unshakable patriotic convictions. That's the Maverick's path to the White House.

I wish my prediction was accurate, although at the time I knew I was really hoping against hope. Nothing seemed to go McCain's way in the last month. Even the presidential debates - in which McCain performed extremely well - we're interpreted as Obama wins, simply for what I thought was Obama showing up, looking moderate and contemplative, and not making any gaffes. Amazingly, we now have news that even the Obama campaign itself understated international threats as a way to tamp down public reservations on his foreign policy inexperience.

That's all under the bridge now: Conservatives of all stripes of will need years to regroup and find their way back for the GOP's return to power.

In an e-mail to me, Robert suggested the McCain camp veered far from bedrock conservative principles, and ignored warnings from the right-wing base while running the GOP ticket into the ground:

That is to say, the idiots running the McCain campaign, who repeatedly rejected sound advice from conservatives, spent the last three weeks of the campaign LYING about their prospects for victory, urging conservatives to believe in a cause they knew to be hopeless. And now those same lying idiots are trying to blame Sarah Palin for their own blunders.

The Reaganauts had a saying, "Personnel is policy." For too long, conservatives have accepted incompetence as a policy because incompetent personnel have escaped accountability for their errors. These self-dealing GOP incompetents need to be called to account. And those of us who saw through their barrage of [baloney] ought to get some credit for being right.

In reading bloggers and pundits the last few days, the dominant meme is that the GOP must return to Reaganite conservatism, i.e., consistent ideological principles focusing on low taxes, low spending, traditional social values, and peace-through-strength intenationalism (or thereabouts).

Yet, some have argued that the Reagan legacy is a chimera, and that it's time for a new generation of leaders on the right, and a new generation of ideas. For example, the National Review's Ramesh Ponnuru wrote:

Republicans have a history of moving right after defeats, embracing Ronald Reagan after Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford had failed, and Newt Gingrich after George H. W. Bush had. Each time the party thrived as conservative independents and Democrats joined it. Many conservatives think that the party will succeed again just as soon as it ditches the big-spending, soft-on-immigration George W. Bush. But Republicans succeeded on those previous occasions because they addressed the concerns of the day for the vast middle class; moving right alone was insufficient.

As it will be in today’s very different political landscape. Based on the exit polls from 2004 and Tuesday, Republicans have lost more ground among self-described moderates than among conservatives. Even if Senator McCain had won the same percentage of conservatives that President Bush did in 2004, he would not have won. Moving right will work only if moderates are given a reason to move right too.

Michael Medved took up the issue as well, in his essay, "Was the 'Maverick' Too Moderate to Win?":

Some of the nation’s most influential conservatives (on talk radio and elsewhere) have begun promoting the odd idea that John McCain lost the election because he ran as a “moderate” and a “maverick” rather than a “true conservative.” According to this argument, the GOP nominee could have won the White House had he only “taken the gloves off” and run to the right, without apology. This logic suggests that candidates fare better when they display ideological rigor and consistency, and that Republicans can never succeed by going after moderate and independent votes.

Fortunately, there’s an easy way to test this theory. McCain appeared on the 2008 ballot with some of the nation’s most outspoken, hard line conservatives, who won nomination for governor or US Senator. If the argument is true that you can win more votes by appealing to right-wingers, rather than aiming for the center, then conservative Senate and gubernatorial candidates should have out-performed McCain, particularly in solidly Republican Southern or Midwestern states....

In fact, McCain ran well ahead of Republican nominees for Senate and governorships almost everywhere – except in those cases when statewide GOP candidates had cultivated their own reputations for independence, centrism, and ideological flexibility.

The key point for both Ponnuru and Medved, from what I gather, is that there's more of an emotional appeal in the call for a return to conservative values than a rational one.

I'm not out to settle the matter here, and Robert will vigorously disagree (samples galore, here).

I'm neoconservative. I want national greatness in foreign policy, traditional values in social policy domestically (especially on abortion, marriage, and race relations), but I'm more flexible on the scope of state power in addressing economic concerns and providing public goods (within reason).

Going forward, the party must pay heed to the demographics of election 2008. Barack Obama won 67 percent of the Latino vote, and also 62 percent of the Asian American vote. First time voters turned out 62 percent for the Democratic ticket, and Obama won 69 percent of the college-age cohort (see also, "Youth Vote for Obama Bodes Ill for Future of GOP").

Moreover, Barack Obama indeed appeared moderate to many voters (taking 60 percent of the centrist electorate), despite GOP attacks to the contrary (the attacks, of course, may ultimately prove prophetic, giving Republicans an opening to campaign against an ideological, overreaching Democratic Party).

Personally, I love Sarah Palin, who for all of her red-meat bona fides with the conservative base, is also pure neocon on American exceptionalism and moral clarity.

On that point, then, perhaps the various factions of the conservatve movement can unite, forging a way back from the wilderness.

Gay Marriage is Not a Civil Right

The debate on homosexual marriage continues to rage after the passage of California's Proposition 8 on Tuesday.

As we saw yesterday, gay rights activists have turned against black voters in the state, who voted in overwhelming numbers to preserve the traditional definition of marriage as that between one man and one woman. Well, it turns out that today's Los Angeles Times offers a look at black views on same-sex marriage, "For Many African Americans, It's Not a Civil Rights Issue":

For Trebor Healey, a 46-year-old gay man from Glendora, Tuesday's election was bittersweet.

He was thrilled that the nation elected its first African American president. But he was disappointed that black voters, traditionally among the most reliably liberal in the state, voted overwhelmingly to ban same-sex marriage.

He understands that there are differences between the civil rights battles of blacks and gays: For one thing, he notes, gay people have a much easier time blending in. Still, he says, he thinks it's sad that "people do not equate one civil rights struggle with another."

Many black voters didn't see it that way.

"I was born black. I can't change that," said Culver City resident Bilson Davis, 57, who voted for Proposition 8. "They weren't born gay; they chose it," he added ....

Los Angeles resident Christopher Hill, 50, said he was motivated by religion in supporting Proposition 8. Civil rights, he said, "are about getting a job, employment."

Gay marriage, he said, is not: "It's an abomination against God."

One of the common attacks on supporters of Prop 8 is that they're bigots, and folks on the left are incredulous that the same voters who supported Barack Obama could in turn reject homosexual marriage rights.

The truth is that if we recall the original foundation of marriage as a union of man and women for the central purpose of procreation, it makes sense that Yes on 8 supporters resist expanding a definition of rights to those who make a lifestyle choice.

Indeed, the effort to change the language of traditional civil rights to include gay marriage has been one of the most clever yet sinister elements of the same-sex marriage movement this last few years. Yet, as Eugene Rivers and Kenneth Johnson indicate, the equation of gay rights with the black feedom struggle - and the traditional civil rights agenda - is a fraud that cheapens the historic legacy for equal treatment under the law in the United States:

There is no evidence in the history and literature of the civil rights movement, or in its genesis in the struggle against slavery, to support the claim that the "gay rights" movement is in the tradition of the African-American struggle for civil rights ....

The extraordinary history of the United States as a slaveholding republic included the kidnapping and brutal transport of blacks from African shores, and the stripping of their language, identity, and culture in order to subjugate and exploit them. It also included the constitutional enshrining of these evils in the form of a Supreme Court decision--Dred Scott v. Sandford--denying to blacks any rights that whites must respect, and the establishment of Jim Crow and de jure racial discrimination after Dred Scott was overturned by a civil war and three historic constitutional amendments.

It is these basic facts that embarrass efforts to exploit the rhetoric of civil rights to advance the goals of generally privileged groups, however much they wish to depict themselves as victims. Whatever wrongs individuals have suffered because some Americans fail in the basic moral obligation to love the sinner, even while hating the sin, there has never been an effort to create a subordinate class subject to exploitation based on "sexual orientation."

It is precisely the indiscriminate promotion of various social groups' desires and preferences as "rights" that has drained the moral authority from the civil rights industry. Let us consider the question of rights. What makes a gay activist's aspiration to overturn thousands of years of universally recognized morality and practice a "right"? Why should an institution designed for the reproduction of civil society and the rearing of children in a moral environment in which their interests are given pride of place be refashioned to accommodate relationships integrated around intrinsically non-marital sexual conduct?

One must, in the current discussion, address directly the assertion of discrimination. The claim that the definition of marriage as the union of one man and one woman constitutes discrimination is based on a false analogy with statutory prohibitions on interracial marriages in many states through much of the 20th century. This alleged analogy collapses when one considers that skin pigmentation is utterly irrelevant to the procreative and unitive functions of marriage. Racial differences do not interfere with the ability of sexually complementary spouses to become "one-flesh," as the Book of Genesis puts it, by sexual intercourse that fulfills the behavioral conditions of procreation. As the law of marital consummation makes clear, and always has made clear, it is this bodily union that serves as the foundation of the profound sharing of life at every level--biological, emotional, dispositional, rational, and spiritual--that marriage is. This explains not only why marriage can only be between a man and a woman, but also why marriages cannot be between more than two people--despite the desire of "polyamorists" to have their sexual preferences and practices legally recognized and blessed.

Moreover, the analogy of same-sex marriage to interracial marriage disregards the whole point of those prohibitions, which was to maintain and advance a system of racial subordination and exploitation. It was to maintain a caste system in which one race was relegated to conditions of social and economic inferiority. The definition of marriage as the union of a man and a woman does not establish a sexual caste system or relegate one sex to conditions of social and economic inferiority. It does, to be sure, deny the recognition as lawful "marriages" to some forms of sexual combining--including polygyny, polyandry, polyamory, and same-sex relationships. But there is nothing invidious or discriminatory about laws that decline to treat all sexual wants or proclivities as equal.

People are equal in worth and dignity, but sexual choices and lifestyles are not. That is why the law's refusal to license polygamous, polyamorous, and homosexual unions is entirely right and proper. In recognizing, favoring, and promoting traditional, monogamous marriage, the law does not violate the "rights" of people whose "lifestyle preferences" are denied the stamp of legal approval. Rather, it furthers and fosters the common good of civil society, and makes proper provision for the physical and moral protection and nurturing of children.

I have no illusions that such rigorous argumentation and logic will convince homosexual rights advocates that gays face no discimination on the question of marriage rights.

But as we can see, the homosexual movement is attempting to create a right to marriage that has no basis in historical practice, and such attempts trivialize the bloody march to equality Americans have endured and overcome.

This is a lesson gay activists should consider, for when 70 percent of blacks in California - the nation's most liberal, trend-setting state - oppose the demands of an extremely vocal radical minority, it's a pretty good indicator that the movement for same-sex marriage rights falls outside the bounds of both traditional law and universal morality.

Obama Goggles

I love the title of Jeff Goldstein's post on the mass media's pro-Obama bias (especially the media's refusal to run stories damaging to "The One"), which helped boost the Democrats to power, "Obama Goggles":

We’re going to see many attempts to ironize away all the talk of media bias as the ravings of rightwing kooks whose ravings, while statistically showing some slight merit, are nevertheless overdetermined, given the final numbers.

– All of which will purposely obscure the point that it wasn’t necessarily the amount of coverage but the kind — and, in Obama’s case, the real complaint isn’t so much the statistical differential as it is the lack of a certain kind of vetting that speaks to the actual bias conservatives complain about.

In short, it’s what the media didn’t tell us about Obama — despite writing more about him — that bolsters the charge. And this is particularly evident when we stop to recall the coverage given to Sarah Palin — the vast majority of which was a deliberate attempt to over vet, to the point where the public knows far more about Ms Palin’s clothes and tanning bed than they do about Obama’s desire to create a civilian security force and to cajole a form of state servitude from the very youth vote whom he counted on to help swing the election his way.

And when these low information voters wake up, the hangover will hit them like that $5000 credit card charge they brought home from a strip club that one time, even though they could only remember having 2 drinks themselves, and buying a single round for the ladies...

Obama goggles, indeed.

Bachmann and Burner: Epic Electoral Fail for Netroots

I want to highlight the dramatic electoral significance of Representative Michele Bachmann's reelection to Congress from Minnesota's 6th district, and the defeat of Darcy Burner, the Democratic congressional candidate for Washington's 8th district, who has now conceded the election to incumbent Dave Reichert after a close race.

Together, the reelection of Bachmann and defeat of Burner mark a startling defeat for the 2008 netroots campaigns of Daily Kos, Firedoglake, Open Left, and their "Blue America" coalition of Internet activists (see also Memeorandum).

After Bachmann appeared on MSNBC's "Hardball with Chris Matthews" in October, where she questioned Barack Obama's patriotism, the big blogs on the left raised close to a $2 million for Bachmann's challenger, El Tinkleberg. Leftists charged Bachmann with "McCarthyism" after she recommended the media look into the degree of anti-Americanism in Congress. While the left was outraged, Bachmann's comments were met sympathetically from her constituents, who said she had no need for apologies. The following comment, in response to some of the angry commenters at the Wall Street Journal, is also telling:

Come on ... let’s be sensible here. Michelle was baited over and over into those questions by Chris Matthews anyone who isn’t a blind partisan could see that and I have watched that interview 4 times to be sure she wasn’t being outright hateful.

She is a good woman and will get the job done ...

Now, Darcy Burner's case is in some ways an even more striking repudiation of the hardcore netroots left than is Bachmann victory.

One of Burner's biggest assets to the left was her leadership in proposing a widely distributed plan for an immediate U.S. withdrawal from Iraq.

Called "A Responsible Plan to End the War in Iraq," the proposal was anything but. The plan called for a complete U.S. military withdrawal from Iraq at precisely the same time that the Bush administration offered a new strategy for victory under the counterinsurgency doctrine of General David Petraeus. Like Barack Obama, Burner wanted to throw in the towel - capitulating to and enabling our terrorist enemies - after the U.S. government had in fact shifted to a new military doctrine that was based on some of the very criticisms the left leveled at the administration earlier in the war (not enough troops going in, poor doctrinal foundations for victory, etc).

But more than this, Burner's what the netroots call "the quintessential Blue America candidate," which is to say, her issue positions are representative of the brooding Bush derangement which is the hallmark of the radical left contigents.

Now, there's a lot of triumphalism on the left following Tuesday's results, for example, in Dave Neiwart's claim of a sweeping repudiation of conservatism in the United States:

No, this election was about one thing primarily: a sweeping repudiation of movement conservatism.

The breadth and depth of Democrats' victory was a loud shout from the American public: We have had enough of this crap.

Actually, as I noted last night, Barack Obama's margin of victory - in both the Electoral College and the popular vote - was less-than-middling by historical standards.

A slight majority of Americans nationwide voted for the change represented in Barack Obama's historic candidacy. But to argue for a sweeping repudiation of conservativism is innacurate. If any candidate should have been "sweepingly repudiated" as a "movement conservative," it's Michele Bachmann (who's frequently slurred on the left as a rightwing extremist of the "lunatic fringe"), who won reelection even after the RNCC caved to pressure from the PC attack dogs on the left.

So, Bachmann's win, and Burner's loss, combined with other indicators, like the decisive defeat of same-sex marriage at the polls across the country, reveals both the limits of left's ideological electoral program, as well as the strong basis for a conservative revival as early as 2010.

Scope and Change in Obama's Victory

The significance of Barack Obama's election as the nation's first black president is more dramatic in its historical change than in terms of the size of his victory.

Frankly, Obama's triumph falls far short of what folks thinkwhen they hear of an "electoral landslide"; and while I haven't seen journalists speak of the Democrats in those terms, left-wing partisans can't find enough chances to announce a "realignment," or a "repudiation" of GOP rule that's left conservatives "irrelevant."

As Michael Cooper reported today, Tuesday's results were less a blowout than a call for change:

One of the many ways the election of Barack Obama differed from recent presidential elections was that in the end, it did not all come down to one state.

The addition on Thursday of the electoral votes from North Carolina — a state that had not voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since Jimmy Carter in 1976 — brought Mr. Obama’s total to 364, well above the 270 needed to win the presidency and the 162 won by Senator John McCain.

The final 2008 Electoral College tally is still not known because Missouri, which has 11 electoral votes, and Nebraska’s Second Congressional District, which has one, are still considered too close to call. (Nebraska and Maine are the only two states that do not allocate their electoral votes on a winner-take-all basis.)

So how does Mr. Obama’s 364, which could go as high as 376, measure up?

“It’s a normal win,” said John C. Fortier, a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, who edited “After the People Vote: A Guide to the Electoral College.” Mr. Fortier called it a respectable, solid mandate.

“It was not a blowout and not a really close election,” he said. “We got a little bit used to these close elections. Until 2005, we were legitimately talking about a 50-50 nation, where everything was close.”

Mr. Obama’s commanding victory does break the habit of decidedly close contests of the last two election cycles. This time around, there was none of the hand-wringing, nail-biting or teeth-gnashing that followed the 2004 election, which the Democrats could have won if they had carried Ohio. And certainly none of the conceding, unconceding, recounts, halted recounts and Supreme Court intervention of 2000 election, which the Democrats could have won if they had carried Florida or any of a number of other states.

For a real blowout, think of the 523 electoral votes that President Franklin D. Roosevelt won in 1936, when he ran against Alf Landon, who won eight. Or more recently the 525 electoral votes President Ronald Reagan won in 1984, when Walter F. Mondale won only 13. Or the 520 President Richard M. Nixon won in 1972 against George McGovern, who won 17. Those were the widest electoral vote margins.

For leftists, it's the disarray of the conservative movement that's important, but it would be a mistake to speak of "irrelevance." In fact, Barack Obama will have his hands full with a determined GOP Senate minority perfectly happy to block the extravagant policy demands of the party's far left-wing contingents, notes Kimberley Strassel:

Democrats won big on Tuesday but not big enough. The voters' rebuke of the GOP was brutal, though not so cruel as to hand Mr. Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid the 60 votes they needed to grease a sweeping agenda. The GOP still owns a filibuster, and that is as big a factor in this new "era" as is our president-elect.

Even the "repudiation" meme is more chest-thumping than substance.

The Democrats offered the electorate literally a once-in-a-lifetime candidate. Barack Obama will be formidable in 2012 when he seeks reelection, but should he retain the office, the Democrats will find him a hard act to follow. There's little evidence that 2008 constitutes a poltical realignment, although the leftists believe that if they can drill their spin into the minds of the media and the voters, the party's natural propensity to overreach will be overlooked.

Proposition 8 and the New Racism

The backlash on the left over the passage of California's Proposition 8 reveals just how nasty Democratic Party identity politics can get sometimes.

It turns out that gay rights activists, in looking for scapegoats for their denial of same-sex marriage at the polls, are attacking blacks for helping to put the intitative over the top.

Pam Spaulding's got the background, but this quote really captures things:

The backlash is upon us, and it's going to get uglier unless our organizations step forward and say something. The desire to scapegoat blacks for Prop 8's defeat has exposed the now not-so-latent racism in our movement.

Spaulding then goes on with a discussion about how she's "three-times" marginalized (apparently as a black woman who's lesbian).

But what she doesn't do is address the inherent pathologies of lefist identity politics itself. She sees herself pulled into the maelsrom of race, rights, and identity, but it's all a misunderstanding, and not an inherent perversion of the left's obsession with race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and on and on, until each side's not getting enough of the spoils, and no coalition can last amid the division.

The fact is, with 70 percent of California's blacks voting in favor of Prop 8, the black community was shedding identity politics to enter into a traditional bloc of voters interested in preserving a valued institution.

For all the cries of GOP racism at the Palin rallies, and so forth, the genuinely wicked attack politics we've seen this year has been on the Democratic-left. As Jammie Wearing Fool notes, "Raw, unexpurgated liberal hate on display. Just imagine if these weren't two protected classes. We'd never hear the end of it."