Because this guy has popularity to burn

At some point in the future, when some crazy right-winger is babbling about how George W. Bush was really a misunderstood Hero-Genius along the lines of Harry Truman, and how we should ignore [insert list of failings too exhausting to write about right now here], remind them that this is the guy who spent his “legacy” period in the White House doing things like cutting healthcare services for poor people. (h/t Matt Yglesias)

I guess that cruelly denying very poor people critical health services sure is one way of shaving down that pesky Emerging Democratic Majority…

What I did last night

For all the talk about Barack Obama being a socialist radical America-hating Muslim, you would certainly not expect people to literally spontaneously break out into the national anthem on the streets of Washington DC at the news of his election.

Just saying…

Yes we did!

It’s the morning after in America

Well apparently the bookmarklet I was using to post has crapped out somehow and ate my post from last night.  That’s just friggin great.  I’m going to rewrite it now.

Our last really important change in American politics happened nearly 30 years ago — a man with a potentially controversial past, whose victory said interesting things about our racial politics (things that some Americans certainly did not want to hear).  A man who was loathed by his political enemies, beloved by his political base and, perhaps most importantly, found ways to grow that base in unprecedented ways.  Of course I’m talking about Ronald Reagan, the man who has left more fingerprints on the last generation of American politics than possibly any other figure.  Perhaps significantly, Reagan’s slogan was eerily close to the one Obama used to fuel his amazing victory last night — instead of “The Change We Need,” he offered “Morning in America.”

Of course, it was a “morning” that left out the poor, the minorities, working class people, and millions of other Americans who weren’t advantaged by bare knuckle capitalism (“bare knuckle” unless you could afford a K St. lobbyist to get that corporate welfare check in your pocket).  But there’s no arguing that by the time that 1984 ad ran, America was a very different place that believed in very different things than it did in 1980.  Reagan and Bush directly ran the country for 12 years, and structured the broad contours of American politics — the things you could and couldn’t say, the ideas that were “mainstream” and “extreme,” the groups who “mattered” and who didn’t — for 28 years.

That ideology structured American politics so much that even Bill Clinton’s Democratic campaign internalized a lot of the same values.  By the time Gore lost (or “lost”), they had gone from a campaign strategy to a matter of almost religious faith.   When I came to college in 2000, you would hear budding wannabe Democratic strategists reeling off long lists of voters who “didn’t matter” because their vote was just too safe: black people, liberals, gays, feminists, environmentalists.  A candidate was only attractive if he seemed like he could reel in white (preferably male) voters on the center-right — exactly the people that Reagan had elevated to the top of the ideological food chain.  A Democrat’s “seriousness” was measured in Sistah Souljah moments; how much time he spent mocking and distancing himself from the people who donated and volunteered for his campaign.  It’s hard to remember now, but many of our Brightest Democratic TeeVee Pundits once held out Joe Lieberman as the model for the party’s future.

That era ended last night.

We now have a President-elect whose campaign rejected many of the Reagan-era assumptions on politics.  It turns out the black folks, the liberals, the card carrying members of the ACLU, and the Human Rights Campaign, and The Sierra Club, and the AFL-CIO, and NOW can actually win you an election if you give them enough incentive to work for you.  It turns out that not all moderate voters are actually Joe the Plumber.

No matter how successful Obama ends up being, it’s hard not to see this as a new day in American politics.  You could feel it last night in DC, as what felt like hundreds of people were out on the streets, honking horns and slowly walking to the White House.  On Penn Ave, a gigantic multiracial crowd was chanting things like “O-bama!” and “Yes We Can!” and singing the national anthem.  Walking home we passed two young black guys clapping and yelling “My president is black!  My president is black!”  It went beyond simple political preferences; this was about hundreds of people coming together in a spirit of raw political passion.

I saw some troubling things last night too — some on the cable news and some on the street — and I’ll be blogging about them later.  But altogether, last night was one of the most inspiring things I’ve seen in this country.  And now the real work of INTELLIGENT, SERIOUS, COMPASSIONATE governing can finally start again at long last.

Election Day!