The analytical quote:

1. The modern conservative movement began with the crushing defeat of Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential race. The modern conservative movement ends with the crushing defeat of Arizona Sen. John McCain — who took Goldwater’s Senate seat upon his retirement — in the 2008 presidential race.

2. Modern liberalism began its implosion with riots in Chicago’s Grant Park at the 1968 Democratic Convention. Tonight, modern liberalism is reborn at Chicago’s Grant Park, where a black Chicago Democrat will celebrate winning the presidency.

- Rod Dreher

The personal quote:

Nothing in my life has actually changed in the 30 minutes since it was announced Obama will be our next president. I have the same bills, the same amount of money in the bank, my dishwasher is still broken, and my 5 month old beagle won’t stop peeing on my carpet. Everything in my life is exactly the same as it was 30 minutes ago; and yet I feel as though everything is different.

I feel so much hope.  I feel so much pride. I feel like my one vote was a single drop of water in a great Tsunami of change. I feel like I was one of a million voices screaming in the night, ” I love my country and I’m taking it back!” I’m so proud of the country that I love and have so much hope in my heart that we can together heal the wounds that have been such a source of pain and anger to us all.

I know Obama isn’t going to fix the economy overnight, I know he won’t be able to provide healthcare to all Americans by February ‘09. I know Obama isn’t a Messiah who four years from now will have turned this country into a fabled utopia. But I also know Obama will make moral decisions. I know Obama will try to unite where others try to divide. I know Obama will help to make America the beacon of hope it once was to others. I know that at 27 years of age, I witnessed one of the most important and hopefully glorious chapters in American history.

I know hope.

- Anonymous Daily Dish reader

Permalink | No comments yet | Print this post

Email this | Add to del.icio.us | Digg this | Share this on Facebook
See other content filed under: Clippings, Maverick A Strike - A US Elections Blog, Politics

This is the first time I’ve realised just how dangerous going negative could be for Obama. Thanks to - conspiracy alert - McCain-Feingold, this and all other Obama ads have to have his specific approval message on. There’s no way to run a Biden-fronted anti-McCain TV campaign that Obama can distance himself from. So every attack has to be balanced against the risk of losing the sheen of bipartisanship that has made Obama attractive so far - especially risky given that McCain has now set out so hard for that same ground.

Obama has to stick to the same strategy he pursued with his convention speech - stay broadly positive and put some meat on the bones. We need details, and more details. That promise of tax cuts for 95% of Americans needs to be repeated, and trumpeted, and sung from the hills till everyone is sick of it. Those details - those specific promises - are the only thing that can keep this campaign from sliding right into a 2004-style gutter of character assasination. And if it comes down to character, Obama will lose. Sorry, he will. If Americans go into that booth and choose the person who, deep down, they just feel they trust more, like more, or would rather have a beer with - it will be McCain who comes out on top. War hero trumps inspiring black guy. It just does.

It’s ironic, given the characterisation of Obama’s victory over Clinton as being one of style over substance, that policy - and particularly economic policy - is actually Obama’s big advantage. He’s not playing it enough.

UPDATE: Andrea Tantaros agrees with me, sort of

UPDATE 2: Sullivan puts it more succinctly:

Obama must maintain the high road. He must keep insisting that the McCain-Palin camp has no new policies to offer on the most critical issues we face, especially in foreign policy. And he must carefully and relentlessly explain what he intends to do. If he does that and refuses to take the bait, he will win. If he descends into the foul sewer where McCain now resides, he will lose.

Karl McCain knows one thing: how to smear, lie, disorient, distract, and intimidate. You can’t beat these thugs and liars at their own game. Beat them at the task of government. They are unfit for it. Obama is not.

UPDATE 3: Joe Biden kind of gets it (he also follow’s Sullivan’s earlier advice to ignore Palin). But will Obama follow this line?

Permalink | No comments yet | Print this post

Email this | Add to del.icio.us | Digg this | Share this on Facebook
See other content filed under: Maverick A Strike - A US Elections Blog, Politics, Posts

Andrew Sullivan (who [a] I’ve never forgiven for not remaining the attractive, slim role model he was when his book, Virtually Normal, was serialised in the Guardian in the 1990s and briefly lit up my gay teenage life; and [b] doesn’t allow comments any more on his blog The Daily Dish, only pingbacks, hence this post) is slightly unfair with his criticism of the inveterate conservative’s gleeful hay-making over Bittergate. Is Kristol, like many conservatives (and Mrs. Clinton*) being entirely disingenuous in pretending that any time a politician, in a private fundraising meeting, makes sweeping generalisations about a section of the electorate and the socioeconomic drivers of their political positions, they’re importuning its collective intelligence? Of course. He goes on to do it himself, a few lines later, by implying that all wealthy San Franciscan democrats are metropolitan snobs (not a generalisation many would disagree with, but then of course that’s the point - many don’t disagree with Obama either). But he doesn’t actually - as Sullivan suggests - cast doubt over Obama’s religious beliefs. Rather, he argues that Obama believes his own religious beliefs to be complex and genuine, but appears not to think that about others.

Not that this is true, or fair, of course. Obama’s choice of verb - he said that people “cling” to religion - was not, as Dan Schnur argued on Left, Right & Center on Friday, the heart of an offensive slur on small-town, working-class whites’ ability to think. Rather, it was entirely the correct word to identify the phenomenon Obama was describing - the phenomenon, unique to America, of religion becoming one of the primary wedges between political parties, despite every significant politician belonging to the same religion. White working-class voters, who believe in God, have been convinced again and again to vote (against their economic interest) for Republican candidates, who believe in God, and to vote against Democratic candidates, who believe in God, because they’ve been persuaded that the Republicans believe in God more strongly than the Democrats do. You don’t have to be a snob, an athiest, or even an arch-liberal to believe this to be at least partly an emotional reaction borne of anxiety and fear - clinging, in other words.

If the presidential candidates were actually from significantly different religions, as in 1960, then you might expect belief to become the primary guide to people’s votes - although the result of 1960 suggests, even then, people might put policy and personality before pulpit. But for this to have happened in a politics entirely dominated by protestantism is bizarre, and somewhat irrational. You could say the same about down-the-line gun-rights voting, when no Democrat has seriously threatened the second amendment for a decade (abortion, where another four years of Republican rule could feasibly lead eventually to the repeal of Roe vs. Wade, is a little different).

A century after Freud, to recognise that people’s voting decisions aren’t entirely rationally based isn’t snobbish, it’s adult. And to deny in public (while, I suspect, acknowledging freely in private) that the phenomenon of the working-class “values voter” owes more than a little to the manipulation of people’s emotions - their anger, their anxiety, and, yes, their bitterness - is duplicitous in the extreme.

So Kristol is innocent of denying the depth of Obama’s faith. But he’s guilty, as usual, of a host of other sins: insincerity, hypocrisy and faux-naivete, for a start.

*I’m having trouble knowing what to call her. To keep using “Hillary”, when I never say “Barack”, seems clearly sexist; but “Senator Clinton” is too pompous and “Clinton” obviously unclear. “Mrs. Clinton” seems the simplest identifier, similar to “George Bush, Jr.”, my preferred name for the current President.

Permalink | No comments yet | Print this post

Email this | Add to del.icio.us | Digg this | Share this on Facebook
See other content filed under: Maverick A Strike - A US Elections Blog, Politics, Posts