Finita la commedia (the end of the comedy) and thank God for it. The election is done and gone. Political zealotry is fading. Celebrations honoring Barack Obama’s great victory have begun to subside. And conservative college students have finally begun to change their melodramatic Facebook statuses from something irrationally banal to proper collegiate banal. Yes “Moving to Canada to avoid socialism” fiends I’m talking to you.
Obviously the fun isn’t completely over. Ironically racist messages such as “FWD: all white people are expected to report to the cotton fields at 7 a.m. Wednesday morning will continue to circulate. Some liberal braggarts will continue mocking anyone who ever contemplated voting for a grizzled geriatric warmonger” like McCain. And everyone – either out of pride or fear of accidentally peeling their car paint – will keep those bumper stickers on their automobiles until 2012 (as long as their gas-guzzling non-hybrids aren’t outlawed by then).
But for the greater part of the country it’s a case of post-election hangover.
Political news has suddenly lost its flavor. Absent two vitriolic campaigns now that the election is over there is no sugar in the oatmeal and now it is just plain brown dreary ground oats – stimulus packages non-proliferation discussions with Iran speculation on when diplomatic attachés will be sent to Iran extensions on the bailout package to the automobile industry – all those generally regulated to CSPAN.
So what do we have left after all this political hoopla? What is the state of America? Are we a country divided? Are we a waning super-power? Are we a self-hating imperialist juggernaut about to be destroyed by our own delusions of permanent ascendancy? Are we a capitalist nation mired in self-entitlement slowly slipping into pragmatic socialism?
Obama has promised to be a unifying force. In his acceptance speech he said “To those Americans whose support I have yet to earn – I may not have won your vote but I hear your voices I need your help.” His media supplicants were quick to seize this moment as an example of the change to come as a sign of President-Elect Obama’s ability to unite to reach out and heal a nation divided. But his words were nothing new. In President Bush’s 2004 acceptance speech Bush claimed “To make this nation stronger and better I will need your support … I will work to earn it … and when we come together and work together there is no limit to the greatness of America.”
The words are nothing new. They have been recycled a thousand times through the machine of politics. But perhaps Obama is an enigma. Perhaps he has the spirit to heal the wounds of the nation’s divided body. Perhaps he can pull us out of the stagnation caused by this economic downturn. Perhaps he can reestablish America’s national pride and make even the Keith Olbermans proud of their country. To accomplish this he will need more than rhetoric. He will need policies that cut spending enhance the market maintain the military and free America from the apocalyptic burden of the entitlement programs that make up roughly half of the federal budget (accounting for more than $1 trillion in 2007 alone).
Perhaps he can do it. Perhaps he can actually change something. But with his tax-and-spend policies wealth-redistribution mentality and protectionist claims I for the life of me do not see how.