Post Mortem
After 21 long months of often maddening campaigning, we finally have a new president-elect in Barack Hussein Obama. Hopefully the tears of joy — and of disappointment, depending on your point of view — have all been shed now so that we can get started with the transition period.
Obama ran a smart campaign, aided immeasurably by the public’s anger at George Bush and — at just the right moment for the Democrats — the collapse of the stock market. The president-elect managed to overcome troubling questions about the questionable people he has been associated with in his Chicago politics days — not that the mainstream media pursued the stories very much, except when they were forced to. As a retired newspaperman, I have never seen professional journalists so openly favoring a political candidate as they did Obama.
Republican nominee John McCain fought a gallant campaign under great disadvantages, but he had no real chance. He was the wrong candidate, for one thing — too old (that made a perfect target for the late-night comedians from whom many Americans get most of their political “news” nowadays); not especially articulate, against an opponent who was a master orator; and prone to saying things in unguarded moments that hurt his candidacy (“I don’t really know much about economics” is a good example). His party had held the White House for eight years, and it’s hard to make it three terms in a row. And as I said above, just at a key moment, when his naming of Sarah Palin as his running mate was boosting his campaign, the banks began to fail and the stock market collapsed. That was pretty much “curtains” for the Republicans.
Did Palin hurt McCain’s campaign? I don’t think SHE did; but I think the way the news media covered her did. They slimed her, big time. It’s a characteristic of the press to depict someone they don’t like in very unflattering terms, on a continuing basis, then announce that — surprise! surprise! — some poll shows that that person is unpopular! But she is young and resilient, and my guess is, she’ll be back.
Now that Barack Obama is starting to build his Cabinet, and has the time he may not have had during the campaign to examine the myriad problems facing the U.S. in detail, he may begin to envy John McCain. Obama is facing big, BIG problems — as McCain would have if he had won.
Both promised tax cuts, targeted differently in each case. I don’t see how any significant cuts can be enacted, with the federal government facing humongous financial obligations — even bigger than it did before all these financial problems blew up. Don’t hold your breath until those tax cuts come. And don’t be surprised if they turn into tax increases — for the average person, not the “top five percent” Obama has promised to “soak.” George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton both had to support tax increases they hadn’t planned on because of circumstances they hadn’t anticipated.
With increases in the Democratic majority in the House and Senate, look for great pressure on our first African-American president to support reparations for slavery. Remember a column of mine from several months ago, predicting that? I’m standing by that prediction. Stay tuned.
Obama has also talked of federal aid for families who can’t pay their mortgages, for local communities, and other entities. The auto companies are lining up for their piece of the federal pie, too. All that would require much, much more money, which we’ve been borrowing for the last eight years. We might wind up even deeper in the hole — or, as I said before, with tax hikes instead of cuts.
I didn’t write anything of a partisan nature on the website for the past several weeks because some of the things I wrote previously had caused a problem for the Democratic county chairman, for whom I was working at the polls. Since he is a good friend of mine, I didn’t want to contribute to that, so I stopped. But now the election’s over, and I don’t have to hold my peace any more. And next year there won’t be any elections, and boy, am I glad! Now I can write about something else for a while.
Old Corporal <corporalko@yahoo.com>
Post mortem, – Saturday, November 08, 2008 at 19:08:38 (EST)
