I'm thrilled with Obama's election, although my optimistism about the real change it will mean is limited.
I'm thrilled largely because of the symbolism of Obama's election, although that's not enough in itself - I would not have been thrilled about Sarah Palin breaking a historical barrier if she and McCain had won. His charisma, on top of his evident ability and sense, make it easy to believe, to feel a faith and hope in this person, that I had not thought was possible in this day and age. Maybe people felt this way before Watergate and the death of the Kennedies, but these days we know politicians are not worth investing any kind of faith into.
I have to say, my expectations of Obama are relatively low. Despite his rhetoric, and despite the claims and hopes of many of his supporters and detractors, he is a mainstream politician. A huge component of his brilliance at speaking is that he doesn't actually say much, he avoids specifics, and particularly, he avoids saying anything that would spook the horses. He makes statements about change, but doesn't specifically talk about doing anything radical. This has allowed many people with different views to overlay their own hopes (and fears) about what he would do onto Obama, and prevented the mainstream from taking claims that he is a Muslim terrorist communist seriously enough to vote against him.
But while I don't believe Obama is going to bring sweeping peace and prosperity to the nation and the world, I do believe he will bring intelligent, sensible, and principled decision-making to the problems that we face. He will be mightily constrained. There is a limit to what a President or an entire government can do to fix an economy going into what is likely to be a heavy recession - the forces of economic cycle don't dance on command.
On the other hand, government can make the damage much worse. The major impediment to good government in the Obama administration will be the Democratic congress, emboldened by the election victory, encouraged by protectionist instincts of the population. Obama does not have much of a record of going against the Democratic estabilishment. But he has shown some glimmers of backbone in this regard - he threw his hat into the ring for the nomination "out of turn", and he made the critical decision not to bow to party establishment pressure to take Hillary onto his ticket, a move that probably would have cost him this election.
The second major impediment to good government, especially a couple years into the Obama administration, will be the Democratic urge to over-compensate on security issues. Historically this led JFK and LBJ to take us into Vietnam, to prove they weren't "soft on communism". More recently this has led the Democrats in Congress to support human rights violations, and Hillary Clinton to campaign as a right-winger. Right wingers will be gearing up even before Inauguration Day to accuse Obama and the Democratic Congress of being soft on terrorism, Russia, Iran, China, etc.
I am hopeful that Obama has the steel and the sense to govern as well as possible in these times. And above all, I'm proud of my fellow citizens for proving wrong those people who have been telling me for the past two years that Americans are too deeply racist to ever see this day.
Congratulations, President-elect Obama.
