Elsewhere Today 493
Aljazeera:
World reacts to Obama's victory
Wednesday, November 05, 2008
11:36 Mecca time, 08:36 GMT
Barack Obama: "[To] all those watching tonight from beyond our shores, from parliaments and palaces to those who are huddled around radios in the forgotten corners of the world - our stories are singular but our destiny is shared. A new dawn of American leadership is at hand.
Afghanistan
Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, congratulated Obama on his US election victory, saying it took the world into a "new era".
Iraq
Hoshyar Zebari, the Iraqi foreign minister said Washington would not adopt a "quick disengagement" policy with Baghdad under the presidency of Barack Obama as a "great deal is at stake here".
Speaking to Al Jazeera, Zebari said: "I think it [Obama's election] was a major, major change ... although as far is Iraq is concerned I don't believe there will be any changes overnight. And there won't be any immediate disengagement because a great deal is at stake for everybody.
"I don't think there is much difference between the Iraqi government position and President-elect Obama's. He is contemplating withdrawing US forces within 16 months. We may have some difficulties with that time-line, but we also, in the status of forces agreement, set the date of 2011 as the date for the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq. So really the differences are not very wide."
Pakistan
Yousuf Raza Gilani, Pakistan's prime minister, congratulated Obama on his victory, saying he hoped the Democrat would promote "peace and stability" in the region around Afghanistan.
"I hope that under your dynamic leadership, [the] United States will continue to be a source of global peace and new ideas for humanity," he said in a statement, directed at Obama.
"I look forward to more opportunities to discuss ways to further strengthen Pakistan-US relations and to promote peace and stability in our region and beyond."
Obama has riled Islamabad in the past, pledging that the US under his leadership would "take out" al-Qaeda and Taliban bases in Pakistan.
Palestinian Territories
Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, congratulated Obama and urged him to speed up efforts to reach an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement.
"President Abbas congratulates US president-elect Barack Obama in his name and in the name of the Palestinian people and hopes he will speed up efforts to achieve peace, particularly since a resolution of the Palestinian problem and the Israeli-Arab conflict is key to world peace," Nabil Abu Rudeina, Abbas's spokesman, said.
"President Abbas hopes the new administration will continue to make the peace efforts one of its top priorities."
Meanwhile, Hamas, which rules the Gaza Strip, urged Obama to learn from the "mistakes" of previous US administrations in dealing with the Muslim and Arab worlds.
"He must learn from the mistakes of the previous administrations, including that of Bush which has destroyed Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine," said Fawzi Barhum, a Hamas spokesman.
"He must improve US ties with the rest of the world rather than wave the big American stick.
"We want him to support the Palestinian cause or at least not to be biased towards the Israeli occupation. We have no problem establishing normal relations with the United States to explain our just cause."
Israel
Israeli-US relations face "a bright future", Ygal Palmor, a spokesman for Israel's foreign ministry, said in reaction to Obama's election to the White House.
"Israelis congratulate the two great friends of Israel, John McCain for his great campaign, Barack Obama for his historic victory.
"We are certain that Israeli-American friendship faces a bright future."
Tzipi Livni, leader of the ruling Kadima party, recalled Obama's visit to Israel in July and said that "the people of Israel felt he [Obama] is a man who is deeply committed to Israel's security and peace".
"Israel hopes to pursue close strategic cooperation with the new administration and the new US president, and hopes to further tighten the unshakeable ties between our two countries," she said.
China
Hu Jintao, China's president, congratulated Obama on his victory in the US presidential poll, saying a closer relationship btween the two nations would be "for the benefit of Chinese and American people, and people around the world".
"In a new historical era, I look forward to ... taking our bilateral relationship of constructive co-operation to a new level," Hu said in a written message, according to a statement on the Chinese foreign ministry's website.
Wen Jiabao, China's prime minister, also congratulated Obama, while Xi Jinping, the vice-president, sent a message of congratulations to Joe Biden, Obama's running mate and America's next vice-president.
Britain
Gordon Brown, the UK's prime minister, congratulated Obama, hailing his "energising politics ... his progressive values and his vision for the future".
"I would like to offer my sincere congratulations to Barack Obama on winning the presidency of the United States," he said in a statement.
"The relationship between the United States and the United Kingdom is vital to our prosperity and security ... Barack Obama ran an inspirational campaign, energising politics with his progressive values and his vision for the future."
India
India's ruling Congress party hailed Obama's victory, saying his "youthful energy" was in tune with the energy of emerging India.
"Obama represents youthful energy, exuberant dynamism and a forward-looking progressive mindset which is also the spirit animating India," Abhishek Manu Singhvi, spokesman for India's Congress party, said.
France
Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, congratulated Obama on a "brilliant victory".
"I give you my warmest congratulations and, through me, those of all French people," Sarkozy told the Democratic candidate in a letter made public by the French presidency.
"Your brilliant victory rewards a tireless commitment to serve the American people. It also crowns an exceptional campaign whose inspiration and exaltation have proved to the entire world the vitality of American democracy. By choosing you, the American people have chosen change, openness and optimism," he wrote.
"At a time when all of us must face huge challenges together, your election raises great hope in France, in Europe and elsewhere in the world."
The European Union
Jose Manuel Barroso, president of the European Comimission, applauded Obama's victory, with Barroso calling for a "new deal".
"This is a time for a renewed commitment between Europe and the United States of America," Barroso said in a statement. "We need to change the current crisis into a new opportunity. We need a new deal for a new world."
"I sincerely hope that with the leadership of President Obama, the United States of America will join forces with Europe to drive this new deal. For the benefit of our societies, for the benefit of the world."
Sudan
Khartoum expressed hope that Obama's election win would mean "real change" for the country's strained relations with the US - America has branded Sundan as a "state sponsor of terrorism".
"The result of the election is a purely domestic affair, but certainly the United States, being the only big power in the world, it affects almost everything in other countries," said Ali al-Sadiq, a spokesman for Sudan's foreign ministry.
"We would hope that the slogan of president Obama - 'change' - would be reflected in the foreign policy in the United States, especially towards Sudan and oppressed countries, the Palestinians, the Iraqis and the Somalis.
"We would like to see some real change between Sudan and the United States."
Somalia
Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed, the president of transitional Somali government, voiced hope that Obama would help end conflict in the world.
"I am congratulating Barack Obama for his election as the president of United States of America," Yusuf said in a statement released by his spokesman.
"I am hopeful that he will help end major crises in the world, particulary the endless conflict in my country Somalia. This was an historic election in which a proper leader was elected. This is a great moment for America and Africa."
Japan
Taro Aso, the Japanese prime minister, offered his "heartfelt congratulations" to Obama, pledging to work with the new leader to strengthen relations.
"I would like to extend my heartfelt congratulations to Senator Obama on his election as President of United States of America," Aso said in a statement.
"I will strive to further strengthen the Japan-US alliance and to resolve various challenges the international community faces when addressing issues such as the international economy, terrorism and the environment."
The Philippines
Gloria Arroyo, the Philippines' president, congratulated Barack Obama for winning the US presidential election.
"We wish to express our profound congratulations to President-elect Barack Obama for his historical and stellar win as the 44th president of the United States," Lorelei Fajardo, a spokesman for Arroyo, said in a statement.
"His call for change opened a new phase in American politics, sparking hope and inspiration not only for the American people but the citizens of the world.
"America has always been the bastion of democracy and the world has always looked to the USA for direction. Obama has promised change and the American people and the world await these changes. We look forward to greater co-operation between the USA and the Philippines, the Democrats have always been good allies."
Australia
Kevin Rudd, the Australian prime minister, praised Obama's victory saying it was a testament to the strength of the US democratic system and was a message of hope not just for the United States but for the whole world.
"Twenty-five years ago Martin Luther King [the US civil right activist] had a dream of an America where men and women would be judged not on the colour of their skin but on the content of their character," Rudd told said.
"Today what America has done is turn that dream into a reality. A world which is in many respects fearful for its future."
Source: Al Jazeera and Agencies
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/americas/2008/11/20081155293464248.html
AllAfrica:
Obama in Historic Victory
By Constance Ikokwu, Fairfax
This Day (Lagos) NEWS
5 November 2008
Slavery officially ended 200 years ago - and until 1965, when the Civil Rights Act was passed, blacks were not allowed to vote in the Southern part of the United States. But the reality today is that Americans have voted for a black man, for the first time in their history, to lead the most powerful country in the world.
THISDAY's projections early this morning, with reports from all leading networks in the US including CNN, Fox News and ABC News, show strongly that Senator Barack Obama, of the Democratic Party, has been elected the 44th President of the United States of America, having won of a significant number of the 538 electoral votes.
The first results which came in just after midnight (Nigerian time) gave Obama the three Electoral College votes in Vermont, while Senator John McCain, the Republican candidate, won the eight electoral votes in the state of Kentucky.
A major blow to McCain came in the crucial swing state of Pennsylvania. He had put great emphasis on campaigning in the state but lost, handing over a princely block of 21 votes to Obama. Pennsylvania was won by the Democrats in the past four elections and was seen as McCain's best chance of stealing a Democratic-leaning state.
McCain and his running mate, Sarah Palin, visited the state 10 times in recent weeks as they tried to turn the traditionally blue state red.
Obama's Ohio victory denied McCain a particularly precious territory. No Republican has ever won the presidency without the state. This was seen as another big blow to McCain.
Obama, the 47-year-old Illinois senator, watched returns at a downtown Chicago hotel, then went home to a family dinner after a marathon campaign across 49 states and 21 months.
A jubilant crowd of thousands gathered in Grant Park across town on an unseasonably mild night. Cheers went up each time Obama was announced the winner in another state.
Obama claimed New York's 31 votes, Illinois' 21, Michigan's 17 and Ohio's very critical 20.
States won by Obama included Wisconsin, Michigan, New York, Rhode Island, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Vermont, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, Maryland and New Jersey, as well as the District of Columbia.
McCain had Arkansas, Kansas, Kentucky, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Wyoming, Alabama, South Carolina and North Dakota.
By tradition, the first ballots were cast just after midnight in little Dixville Notch, New Hampshire State, where Obama got 15 votes and McCain six.
Results were still coming in when THISDAY went to press, but Obama's lead was virtually insurmountable. He has passed the 200 mark in electoral votes, while McCain had only reached half of that figure.
Key States...
Pennsylvania
Obama - 21
McCain - 0
New Hampshire
Obama - 4
McCain - 0
Ohio
Obama - 20
McCain - 0
Maine
Obama - 10
McCain - 0
New York
Obama - 31
McCain - 0
Tennessee
Obama - 0
McCain - 11
South Carolina
Obama - 0
McCain - 8
Copyright © 2008 This Day. All rights reserved.
http://allafrica.com/stories/200811050014.html
AlterNet:
What an Amazing Moment!
By William Greider, TheNation.com
Posted on November 5, 2008
We are inheritors of this momentous victory, but it was not ours. The laurels properly belong to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and all of the other martyrs who died for civil rights. And to millions more before them who struggled across centuries and fell short of winning their freedom. And to those rare politicians like Lyndon B. Johnson, who stood up bravely in a decisive time, knowing how much it would cost his political party for years to come. We owe all of them for this moment.
Whatever happens next, Barack Obama has already changed this nation profoundly. Like King before him, the man is a great and brave teacher. Obama developed out of his life experiences a different understanding of the country, and he had the courage to run for president by offering this vision.
For many Americans, it seemed too much to believe, yet he turned out to be right about us. Against all odds, he persuaded a majority of Americans to believe in their own better natures and, by electing him, the people helped make it true. There is mysterious music in democracy when people decide to believe in themselves.
Waiting for the results, we all felt nagging tension, even when we were fairly sure of the outcome. I heard from a newspaper friend, a wise old reporter who never gave in to Washington cynicism. "This election eve night," he wrote, "I feel myself tingling about the prospect of a nation which used to lynch blacks during my lifetime electing a black man president. I so hope it happens, believe it would electrify the world. I think he is the bravest man in the world, perhaps the most foolish one as well…. I worry about him like a Jewish mama."
We heard from another family friend, an African-American woman who teaches law in North Carolina. She reported weeping involuntarily when she saw Obama's picture. Did she know why? She said she saw her adolescent son's face in Obama's. Great moments in history give emotional definition to our lives and we carry those feelings forward with us, our own private meaning of events.
In this way, Obama redefined the country for us, but our responses involved generational differences. For younger people, white and black, his vision seemed entirely straightforward. It is the country they already know, and they expressed great enthusiasm. Finally, they said, a politician who recognizes the racial differences that are part of their lives and no big deal. For young blacks and other minorities, Obama's place at the pinnacle of official power lifts a coarse cloak that has blanketed their lives and dreams - the stultifying burden of being judged, whether they succeed or fail, on the basis of their race.
For others of us at an advanced age, Obama's success is more shocking. We can see it as a monumental rebuke to tragic history - the ultimate defeat of "white supremacy."
That vile phrase was embedded in American society (even the Constitution) from the outset and was still in common usage when some of us were young. Now it is officially obsolete. Racism will not disappear entirely, but the Republican "Southern strategy" that marketed racism has been smashed.
Americans will now be able to see themselves differently, North and South, white and black. The changes will spread through American life in ways we cannot yet fully imagine. Let us congratulate ourselves on being alive at such a promising moment.
William Greider is the author of, most recently, "The Soul of Capitalism" (Simon & Schuster).
© 2008 TheNation.com All rights reserved.
View this story online at:
http://www.alternet.org/story/106108/
Arab News:
Obama makes history with win in US presidential vote
John Whitesides | Reuters
Wednesday 5 November 2008 (08 Dhul Qa`dah 1429)
WASHINGTON: Democrat Barack Obama captured the White House yesterday after an extraordinary two-year campaign, defeating Republican John McCain to make history as the first black to be elected US president.
Obama will be sworn in as the 44th US president on Jan. 20, 2009, television networks said. He and his running mate Joe Biden will face a crush of immediate challenges, from tackling an economic crisis to ending the war in Iraq and striking a compromise on overhauling the health care system.
McCain conceded defeat to Obama soon after the TV projections called California for Obama. He called Obama to offer his congratulations and said in his concession speech that Obama "inspired the hopes" of many Americans.
McCain saw his hopes for victory evaporate with losses in a string of key battleground states led by Ohio, the state that narrowly clinched President George W. Bush's re-election in 2004, and Virginia, a state that had not backed a Democrat since 1964.
After a close battle in Florida, where Obama edged out his Republican rival, the Illinois senator won all 27 electoral votes from the fourth most populous US state. While Florida voted Republican in eight of the 10 previous presidential elections, most opinion polls since late September had given Obama a slight edge.
Florida, along with Pennsylvania and Ohio, has played a critical role in presidential elections for nearly 50 years. No candidate since 1960 has won the presidency without capturing two of the three.
Obama led a Democratic electoral landslide that also expanded the party's majorities in both chambers of Congress and firmly repudiated eight years of Republican President George W. Bush's leadership.
The win by Obama, son of a black father from Kenya and white mother from Kansas, marked a milestone in US history. It came 45 years after the height of the civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King.
In a campaign dominated at the end by a flood of bad news on the economy, Obama's leadership and proposals on how to handle the crisis tipped the race in his favor. Exit polls showed six of every 10 voters listed the economy as the top issue.
Tens of thousands of Obama supporters gathered in Chicago's Grant Park for an election night rally that had the air of a celebratory concert, cheering results that showed his victories in key states.
McCain, a 72-year-old Arizona senator and former Vietnam War prisoner, had hoped to become the oldest president to begin a first term in the White House and see his running mate Sarah Palin become the first female US vice president.
'God bless my successor'
The vastly unpopular US President George W. Bush cloistered himself with family and friends as America voted yesterday, privately invoking God's blessing on whoever succeeds him, his spokeswoman said.
Bush hosted a dinner with relatives and close aides, celebrating US first lady Laura Bush's birthday in a White House dining room with a dinner ending with coconut cake, press secretary Dana Perino said by e-mail.
"The president gave a toast at the start of the dinner thanking those present for all the work they've done and for their friendship. He ended by saying, 'And may God bless whoever wins tonight,'" Perino told reporters.
The president watched election returns with family and senior aides in the residence section of the presidential mansion, she said. "The president believes tonight is a night to appreciate the strength of our country and our democracy, as citizens from all over the country exercised their right to vote today, after a historic campaign," she said.
"The president is committed to a transition that is as smooth as possible, a process that has been under way for many months, and as soon as we have a president-elect we'll be able to do even more on that front," said Perino.
Copyright: Arab News © 2003 All rights reserved.
http://www.arabnews.com/?page=4§ion=0&article=116121&d=5&m=11&y=2008
Asia Times:
Mission accomplished - Part 1
By Julian Delasantellis
Nov 6, 2008
Even with the polls relatively close until the end, I could see the results of the American presidential election in a walk I took in early October at a swap meet - for non-US folk, an unofficial bring-and-buy street market - in downtown Los Angeles. There, amid all the clunky gold chains, bling medallions and pink taffeta party gowns, I was amazed to see large numbers of Barack Obama T-shirts.
The flimsy materials and cheap silk-screening made it obvious that these were not official products of the Obama campaign, like the designs, which seemed to imply that Obama's running mate in the campaign was not Joe Biden of Delaware but the late Bob Marley of Jamaica.
I tried to think of a previous Democratic Party nominee who had engendered such excitement. Who else would have spurred the micro-capitalists who sell their wares at swap meets to such endeavors? It certainly would not have been Michael Dukakis, the intelligent but crushingly, deathly dull Massachusetts governor who was the party's choice in 1988. Perhaps the only people who might have admired his style in charisma and excitement sufficiently to put his face on a T-shirt would be the likes of the Middle Atlantic Express Train Schedulers Association.
So Obamamania, the nationwide phenomenon that manifested itself everywhere - from the rallies where just the candidate's presence caused young people to faint away to the adult toy stores where the senator's image was drawn on the most unlikely of devices - carries the day. The question now becomes, can he even come close to meeting the ferocious expectations for a better life, in a better country, that were raised by him during the campaign?
For most of the time since Obama clinched the nomination from Senator Hillary Clinton in June, he carried roughly a 3-5% lead in the polls; this briefly flipped to a similar lead for John McCain after the choice of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as the Republican vice presidential nominee. That effect faded as soon as Palin opened her mouth. Still, the McCain/Palin campaign was doing a serviceable job of maintaining contact with Obama-Biden until it hit the iceberg - the month-long financial and stock market collapse that started with the failure of investment bank Lehman Brothers on September 22.
When the Titanic's lookouts cried out "iceberg, right ahead", it was obvious that the ship was doomed. Likewise for the McCain campaign on the breaking dawn of the September financial crisis.
Most Americans supplant the relatively paltry returns of the government's old-age social security pension support plan with stock investments in tax-advantaged holding accounts called 401-Ks. When stocks fell to six-year lows in early October a lot of dreams of early retirements on sun-splashed Florida fairways had to be supplanted by nightmare images of dragging tired, arthritic bones every morning until death to their station at the fast food french-fry cooker.
Indeed, the financial crisis probably has gone a long way towards solving the long-term funding crisis of social security, in that now millions of Americans won't be able to retire and draw on the system, given that the stock portion of their retirement package is now worth so much less.
McCain/Palin tried everything, throwing the kitchen sink, indeed, the entirety of the house's plumbing, at their opponent - calling him a terrorist sympathizer, a socialist, even a communist. All for naught. Americans listened to the Republican charges, weighed them against the prospect of ending their lives as galley slaves rowing away their last days for the McDonald's empire, and decided that giving the terrorist/socialist/communist a chance wasn't such a bad idea.
Last December, with the economy not nearly in as dire straits as it is now, McCain pooh-poohed the idea that he should even be all that concerned with matters economic by telling The Boston Globe, "The issue of economics is not something I've understood as well as I should, I've got [ex Federal Reserve head Alan] Greenspan's book."
Surprisingly, sounding like a stubborn schoolboy being forced to look at an economics textbook when he'd rather be out playing war with his toy soldiers did not hurt McCain all that much in the Republican nominating contests of last winter, when all the candidates were competing to see who could proclaim their intentions to bomb the most countries the hardest.
But as spring turned to summer and then to autumn, and slow growth turned to deep recession, McCain's cavalier attitude towards economics-related issues turned voters off. Nor was his cause helped by his series of highly gymnastic, focus-group generated, policy undulations during the September crisis.
Besides, getting advice from Greenspan about the current world financial crisis is a lot like the Chicago Fire Department taking advice on how not to start fires from Mrs O'Leary's cow.
So, Americans are trusting Obama for a return to prosperity. Can he deliver? If you read Henry Blodget, you'd have to have your doubts.
Blodget proves the adage that, in contemporary America, celebrity trumps morality every time. In the 1990s, as an Internet stock analyst for CIBC Oppenheimer and Merrill Lynch, he was renowned for publicly singing the accolades of dot-com stocks he privately ridiculed and which eventually disappeared. He was particularly famous for privately calling a stock he publicly lauded a "p.o.s." - and no, that does not mean "particle of sunshine".
Eventually, the Feds caught up with him, charging him with securities fraud. Blodget never admitted guilt, but he agreed to a big fine and permanent banishment from the securities industry.
In his shame, did Blodget, like Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, throw himself under a locomotive? No way. He is now a prominent writer and blogger on economics and investing, frequently advising small investors on how to spot shady brokerage practices - who would know better?
But it was one of his recent postings, on the "Clusterstock" web site, that caught my eye, and made me wonder if Obama has raised hopes impossible to fulfill.
In an October 29 post, entitled "What Does 'Deleveraging' Really Mean? Cutting $25 Trillion Of Debt", Blodget looked at the American economic history of the past 75 years from a whole new perspective, graphing changes in the ratio of total credit market debt to gross domestic product (GDP) over this period.
Around 1920, this number stood at 170% - that is, $1.70 of debt for every $1.00 of GDP. The ratio soared to about 260 during the Great Depression, as GDP shrunk the ratio's denominator, then, following World War ll, was essentially stable around 140 for almost 40 years, to 1986. It was then that the ratio began its stratospheric climb, topping out at 356 earlier this year.
From this perspective, the economic history of the past quarter century looks much different, and is much easier to understand. It was not Reaganomics, nor even Clintonics, that was responsible for all the prosperity since the 1980s; it was just Americans borrowing, being allowed to borrow, more than they ever had before, and then spending away the proceeds.
But now, the debt engine has stalled and is going into reverse. Blodget notes that about $700 billion of bank debt has been "written down", has evaporated these past months. But that's just the proverbial drop in the bucket compared with the amount he says debt must shrink for the ratio to return to the normal post-war levels in the mid-100s.
How much does Blodget say debt levels must shrink? $25 trillion - 35 times more than what has already been written down. Think of the current difficulties, multiply by 35, just imagine what that would look like.
It is obvious what is happening here - it's a lender's strike. For years, lenders have been giving away mortgage money cheaply, say at 5%, but after a year of the real estate inflation typical of this decade it would take $1.30, not the $1.05 the lender would get back, to buy as much house as the $1.00 bought the previous year. It was a losing game. Finally, the lenders walked away from the table, and the deleveraging plague commenced.
What can Obama do to get lenders to lend, to re-leverage? Maybe he can spur some growth with a fiscal stimulus, such as infrastructure spending, but that won't necessarily get lenders to start lending again. He can put people to work pushing brooms or leaning on shovels and keep them from starving, but neither of these government-funded avocations will satisfy the real Joe-the-Plumber American definition and vision of prosperity - multiple big houses with big boats side by side with fast cars and/or monster SUVs in all their driveways; big, flat TVs and anything but flat expensive second- or third-trophy wives.
Maybe all that Obama can really do is to counteract the contemporaneous incredibly toxic and polarized American political and social culture - President George W Bush and his former advisor Karl Rove's attempt to ensure a permanent Republican future by making 51% of the population always want to draw a knife across the carotid artery of the other 49%.
Recently, there were reports that a Midwestern American woman made trick-or-treating children affirm that their parents were not going to be Obama voters before giving them their Halloween treats.
If Americans really are tired of this, if they really do value most the blissful comradeship of trusted neighbors all living in modest houses in happy, contented communities, then Obama's route into the history books may be an easy one.
If not, if what Americans really want is to once again be able to buy the big plasma TV and sit in front of it in the plush media room of their big house, isolated from the rest of the world by their big honkin' security system, well, then it's all uphill from here.
Julian Delasantellis is a management consultant, private investor and educator in international business in the US state of Washington. He can be reached at juliandelasantellis@yahoo.com.
Copyright 2008 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/JK06Dj01.html
Clarín: Ganó Obama y EE.UU. tendrá
su primer presidente negro
Logró un triunfo histórico con el que pone fin a ocho años de gobierno republicano. Se impuso en los estados del noreste, el norte y el oeste. En el centro y el sur votaron mayoritariamente por McCain. Deberá dirigir un país que tiene dos guerras en el extranjero y la mayor crisis económica en más de 70 años.
Por: Clarín.com
05.11.2008
Barack Obama será el primer presidente negro de los Estados Unidos. Su victoria ya es oficial: la reconoció su contendiente republicano, John McCain. Las proyecciones de los medios estadounidenses y la tendencia que muestra el recuento de votos son concluyentes: el triunfo es aplastante en cuanto a la cantidad de delegados que logró para la asamblea electoral.
Según datos oficiales, el demócrata ya tiene asegurados unos 349 delegados; necesitaba 270 para convertirse en presidente. Mientras que McCain por ahora, llegando a las 8 de la mañana hora argentina, alcanza los 147.
A está hora, a su vez, la mayoría de los resultados de la costa este ya fueron escrutados en casi un 100%, mientras que en el oeste las cifras llegan con mayor lentitud. Se estima que en las próximas dos horas estarán los resultados definitivos.
El triunfo de Obama se construyó de acuerdo a lo que preveían las últimas encuestas. Ganó en los estados del noreste, el norte y el oeste y perdio en los del centro y el sur. En Florida, uno de los estados clave por la cantidad de electores, logró una ajustada victoria. Y otros estados en para los que se preveía un final ajustado muestran un recuento voto a voto.
La victoria de Obama lo catapulta a uno de los puestos de mayor responsabilidad en el mundo, en un momento particularmente difícil. Los ocho años de gobierno republicano de George W. Bush, marcados a fuego desde el inicio por los atentados del 11 de septiembre de 2001, dejaron al país embarcado en dos guerras (Irak y Afganistán) y en medio de la mayor crisis financiera desde la década de 1930.
Los comicios de hoy son históricos por más de un motivo. Principalmente, porque representan la llegada de un hombre de color a la presidencia de los Estados Unidos, un país en el que existió segregación racial hasta mediados del siglo XX. Pero también porque habrían marcado un récord de votantes, con una afluencia de hasta 130 millones de electores (de los 153 millones habilitados). Es decir, cerca del 75% de los ciudadanos con derecho a hacerlo. Ya lo habían hecho en forma anticipada unos 29 millones de votantes en 30 estados.
Copyright 1996-2008 Clarín.com - All rights reserved
http://www.clarin.com/diario/2008/11/05/um/m-01796284.htm
Guardian: US elections 2008
Obama acceptance speech in full
A speech by the new president-elect of the United States of America, Barack Obama
Obama gave his victory speech to an emotional crowd in Chicago
Link to the video
Barack Obama
guardian.co.uk,
Wednesday November 05 2008 05.24 GMT
If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible; who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time; who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.
It's the answer told by lines that stretched around schools and churches in numbers this nation has never seen; by people who waited three hours and four hours, many for the very first time in their lives, because they believed that this time must be different; that their voice could be that difference.
It's the answer spoken by young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Latino, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled – Americans who sent a message to the world that we have never been a collection of Red States and Blue States: we are, and always will be, the United States of America.
It's the answer that led those who have been told for so long by so many to be cynical, and fearful, and doubtful of what we can achieve to put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day.
It's been a long time coming, but tonight, because of what we did on this day, in this election, at this defining moment, change has come to America.
I just received a very gracious call from Senator McCain. He fought long and hard in this campaign, and he's fought even longer and harder for the country he loves. He has endured sacrifices for America that most of us cannot begin to imagine, and we are better off for the service rendered by this brave and selfless leader. I congratulate him and Governor Palin for all they have achieved, and I look forward to working with them to renew this nation's promise in the months ahead.
I want to thank my partner in this journey, a man who campaigned from his heart and spoke for the men and women he grew up with on the streets of Scranton and rode with on that train home to Delaware, the Vice President-elect of the United States, Joe Biden.
I would not be standing here tonight without the unyielding support of my best friend for the last sixteen years, the rock of our family and the love of my life, our nation's next First Lady, Michelle Obama. Sasha and Malia, I love you both so much, and you have earned the new puppy that's coming with us to the White House. And while she's no longer with us, I know my grandmother is watching, along with the family that made me who I am. I miss them tonight, and know that my debt to them is beyond measure.
To my campaign manager David Plouffe, my chief strategist David Axelrod, and the best campaign team ever assembled in the history of politics – you made this happen, and I am forever grateful for what you've sacrificed to get it done.
But above all, I will never forget who this victory truly belongs to – it belongs to you.
I was never the likeliest candidate for this office. We didn't start with much money or many endorsements. Our campaign was not hatched in the halls of Washington – it began in the backyards of Des Moines and the living rooms of Concord and the front porches of Charleston.
It was built by working men and women who dug into what little savings they had to give five dollars and ten dollars and twenty dollars to this cause. It grew strength from the young people who rejected the myth of their generation's apathy; who left their homes and their families for jobs that offered little pay and less sleep; from the not-so-young people who braved the bitter cold and scorching heat to knock on the doors of perfect strangers; from the millions of Americans who volunteered, and organized, and proved that more than two centuries later, a government of the people, by the people and for the people has not perished from this Earth. This is your victory.
I know you didn't do this just to win an election and I know you didn't do it for me. You did it because you understand the enormity of the task that lies ahead. For even as we celebrate tonight, we know the challenges that tomorrow will bring are the greatest of our lifetime – two wars, a planet in peril, the worst financial crisis in a century. Even as we stand here tonight, we know there are brave Americans waking up in the deserts of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan to risk their lives for us. There are mothers and fathers who will lie awake after their children fall asleep and wonder how they'll make the mortgage, or pay their doctor's bills, or save enough for college. There is new energy to harness and new jobs to be created; new schools to build and threats to meet and alliances to repair.
The road ahead will be long. Our climb will be steep. We may not get there in one year or even one term, but America – I have never been more hopeful than I am tonight that we will get there. I promise you – we as a people will get there.
There will be setbacks and false starts. There are many who won't agree with every decision or policy I make as President, and we know that government can't solve every problem. But I will always be honest with you about the challenges we face. I will listen to you, especially when we disagree. And above all, I will ask you join in the work of remaking this nation the only way it's been done in America for two-hundred and twenty-one years – block by block, brick by brick, calloused hand by calloused hand.
What began twenty-one months ago in the depths of winter must not end on this autumn night. This victory alone is not the change we seek – it is only the chance for us to make that change. And that cannot happen if we go back to the way things were. It cannot happen without you.
So let us summon a new spirit of patriotism; of service and responsibility where each of us resolves to pitch in and work harder and look after not only ourselves, but each other. Let us remember that if this financial crisis taught us anything, it's that we cannot have a thriving Wall Street while Main Street suffers – in this country, we rise or fall as one nation; as one people.
Let us resist the temptation to fall back on the same partisanship and pettiness and immaturity that has poisoned our politics for so long. Let us remember that it was a man from this state who first carried the banner of the Republican Party to the White House – a party founded on the values of self-reliance, individual liberty, and national unity. Those are values we all share, and while the Democratic Party has won a great victory tonight, we do so with a measure of humility and determination to heal the divides that have held back our progress. As Lincoln said to a nation far more divided than ours, "We are not enemies, but friends…though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection." And 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, and I will be your President too.
And to all those watching tonight from beyond our shores, from parliaments and palaces to those who are huddled around radios in the forgotten corners of our world – our stories are singular, but our destiny is shared, and a new dawn of American leadership is at hand. To those who would tear this world down – we will defeat you. To those who seek peace and security – we support you. And to all those who have wondered if America's beacon still burns as bright – tonight we proved once more that the true strength of our nation comes not from our the might of our arms or the scale of our wealth, but from the enduring power of our ideals: democracy, liberty, opportunity, and unyielding hope.
For that is the true genius of America – that America can change. Our union can be perfected. And what we have already achieved gives us hope for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.
This election had many firsts and many stories that will be told for generations. But one that's on my mind tonight is about a woman who cast her ballot in Atlanta. She's a lot like the millions of others who stood in line to make their voice heard in this election except for one thing – Ann Nixon Cooper is 106 years old.
She was born just a generation past slavery; a time when there were no cars on the road or planes in the sky; when someone like her couldn't vote for two reasons – because she was a woman and because of the color of her skin.
And tonight, I think about all that she's seen throughout her century in America – the heartache and the hope; the struggle and the progress; the times we were told that we can't, and the people who pressed on with that American creed: Yes we can.
At a time when women's voices were silenced and their hopes dismissed, she lived to see them stand up and speak out and reach for the ballot. Yes we can.
When there was despair in the dust bowl and depression across the land, she saw a nation conquer fear itself with a New Deal, new jobs and a new sense of common purpose. Yes we can.
When the bombs fell on our harbor and tyranny threatened the world, she was there to witness a generation rise to greatness and a democracy was saved. Yes we can.
She was there for the buses in Montgomery, the hoses in Birmingham, a bridge in Selma, and a preacher from Atlanta who told a people that "We Shall Overcome." Yes we can.
A man touched down on the moon, a wall came down in Berlin, a world was connected by our own science and imagination. And this year, in this election, she touched her finger to a screen, and cast her vote, because after 106 years in America, through the best of times and the darkest of hours, she knows how America can change. Yes we can.
America, we have come so far. We have seen so much. But there is so much more to do. So tonight, let us ask ourselves – if our children should live to see the next century; if my daughters should be so lucky to live as long as Ann Nixon Cooper, what change will they see? What progress will we have made?
This is our chance to answer that call. This is our moment. This is our time – to put our people back to work and open doors of opportunity for our kids; to restore prosperity and promote the cause of peace; to reclaim the American Dream and reaffirm that fundamental truth – that out of many, we are one; that while we breathe, we hope, and where we are met with cynicism, and doubt, and those who tell us that we can't, we will respond with that timeless creed that sums up the spirit of a people:
Yes We Can. Thank you, God bless you, and may God Bless the United States of America.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/nov/05/uselections2008-barackobama
Jeune Afrique: Victoire écrasante de Barack Obama,
44ème président des Etats-Unis
ETATS-UNIS - 5 novembre 2008 - par AFP
Le démocrate Barack Obama a remporté une victoire historique et écrasante sur son adversaire républicain John McCain, devenant, à seulement 47 ans, le premier Noir élu président des Etats-Unis.
"Il a fallu longtemps. Mais ce soir, grâce à ce que nous avons fait aujourd'hui et pendant cette élection, en ce moment historique, le changement est arrivé en Amérique", a affirmé M. Obama, à l'occasion de son premier discours de président élu, devant une foule oscillant entre joie et émotion, dans l'immense jardin public Grant Park, cerné de gratte-ciels illuminés au bord du lac Michigan à Chicago.
"Si jamais quelqu'un doute encore que l'Amérique est un endroit où tout est possible, qui se demande si le rêve de nos pères fondateurs est toujours vivant, qui doute encore du pouvoir de notre démocratie, ce soir est la réponse", a-t-il fait valoir. "C'est votre victoire", a-t-il assuré à ses partisans.
Il a salué son adversaire républicain John McCain qui "a enduré des sacrifices pour l'Amérique que la plupart d'entre nous ne peuvent même pas commencer à imaginer". "Je le félicite" pour sa campagne, a-t-il dit.
M. Obama a également rendu hommage à sa femme Michelle et à ses deux filles, Malia et Sasha, 10 et 7 ans, qui l'accompagnaient à la tribune. Après son discours il a été rejoint par son colistier Joe Biden et sa famille.
Dès l'annonce de la victoire d'Obama, des scènes de liesse ont éclaté dans plusieurs villes américaines. Les quelque 65.000 personnes rassemblées à Grant Park ont laissé éclater leur joie et leur émotion, brandissant des drapeaux américains et des pancartes frappées du slogan "Yes we can" (oui nous le pouvons), du sénateur de l'Illinois.
Le président George W. Bush a appelé celui qui doit lui succéder le 20 janvier pour le féliciter de sa victoire à l'issue d'une "superbe" soirée électorale, a indiqué la porte-parole de la Maison Blanche, Dana Perino. Des milliers de personnes se sont massées devant les grilles de la présidence, en scandant "Obama, Obama".
L'adversaire républicain de M. Obama, John McCain a reconnu sa défaite, indiquant à ses partisans, rassemblés à Phoenix (Arizona, sud-ouest) qu'il avait félicité M. Obama. Des sifflets ont accueilli ces paroles.
"Cet échec est le mien pas le vôtre. J'aurais souhaité que le résultat soit différent", a dit le sénateur de l'Arizona, accompagné de sa femme Cindy et de sa colistière Sarah Palin.
"Le peuple américain a parlé, et il a parlé clairement", a ajouté le sénateur âgé de 72 ans qui a failli devenir le président le plus âgé à faire son entrée à la Maison Blanche. Mais son expérience, dont il a joué face à son rival Barack Obama, de 25 ans son cadet, n'a pas suffi à convaincre.
"C'est une élection historique", a-t-il poursuivi. "Je reconnais la signification particulière qu'elle a pour les Noirs américains, la fierté qui doit être la leur ce soir".
Le président élu va hériter d'une situation économique extrêmement difficile. Les Etats-Unis, et le monde dans leur sillage, traversent la plus grave crise financière depuis celle de 1929. Le pays est engagé dans deux guerres, en Irak et en Afghanistan. M. Obama a promis de baisser les impôts pour 95% des salariés, d'engager une politique de grands travaux et de garantir une couverture santé pour tous.
Sur le plan international, il a promis de retirer les soldats américains d'Irak "de façon responsable" dans un délai de 16 mois et de concentrer les efforts à la lutte contre Al-Qaïda et les talibans.
Sa tâche pourrait être cependant facilitée par un Congrès qui demeure à majorité démocrate.
Les Américains étaient aussi appelés à renouveler un tiers du Sénat et la totalité de la Chambre des représentants et, selon des résultats partiels, les démocrates avaient ravi cinq sièges aux républicains au Sénat américain ce qui leur permettrait d'avoir 56 sièges sur 100. Les démocrates ont également conforté leur majorité à la Chambre des représentants.
Les Américains se sont massivement mobilisés pour choisir le successeur de l'impopulaire George W. Bush. Le taux de participation a atteint un niveau sans précédent" dans plusieurs Etats clés. Certains experts estimaient qu'entre 130 et 135 millions d'électeurs pourraient avoir voté, contre 120 millions en 2004. Aucun incident majeur n'a été signalé au cours de cette élection.
Aussitôt après l'annonce de la victoire de M. Obama, les marchés d'Asie-Pacifique s'affichaient en forte hausse, portés par un sentiment d'optimisme. Les contrats à terme sur les indices boursiers de la Bourse de New York, censés préfigurer leur évolution future, ont bondi après l'annonce des résultats.
A Paris, l'Élysée a fait savoir que Nicolas Sarkozy avait félicité Barack Obama pour sa "victoire brillante", dans une lettre au président élu des États-Unis.
http://www.jeuneafrique.com/jeune_afrique/
article_depeche.asp?art_cle=AFP93608victosinust0
Mail & Guardian:
Obama's victory brings a new dawn of leadership
JONATHAN FREEDLAND - Nov 05 2008 11:56
The man who once described himself as a "skinny kid with a funny name" stood before a vast, euphoric crowd - and a watching world - and in a speech that was by turns sombre and inspirational, took upon his shoulders the great weight of leadership of the United States of America.
Barack Obama emerged on to the stage at Chicago's Grant Park as president-elect to greet a crowd that had waited for several hours to see him - and for decades to witness such a moment. There had been tears all evening, as one key state after another fell - first Pennsylvania, then Ohio - turning the hope of victory into a certainty.
But for many it was the sight of the man himself that finally made reality sink in. There he was: an African-American man who from today will be addressed as Mr President.
Obama himself seemed to understand the gravity of the moment. Save for a few thank-yous to his campaign team - and a message to his daughters that they had earned the new puppy that the Obamas will take with them to the White House - he did not deliver a cheery victory speech celebrating an electoral triumph. Instead he used the occasion to give the first address of his presidency.
He declared that "Change has come to America," but left no doubt that his election marked only the first step along a road that will prove long and hard. "We may not get there in one year or in one term," he cautioned. "But we will get there."
Reprising a line he had used in the stump speech that launched his "improbable journey" in the snows of Iowa and New Hampshire a year ago, he reminded his audience that they were a nation at war, with an economy in trouble, living on a planet in peril. He called on all Americans - including those who had not voted for him - to join him in the tough work ahead: "I hear your voices, I need your help and I will be your president too."
It was one of several calls for unity from the man who made his name with a 2004 plea for America to remember that it is not made up of blue states or red states, but must always be the United States. He seemed to be attempting to assemble a new coalition, even a government of national unity, to tackle the great challenges of the age. In a flourish that echoed John F Kennedy, he declared: "Let us summon a new spirit of patriotism; of service and responsibility where each of us resolves to pitch in and work harder and look after not only ourselves, but each other."
The crowd in Grant Park - scene of one of the most bruising chapters in recent US political history, the Chicago riots of 1968 - stood rapt. They listened as Obama seemed to steel them for a collective effort unseen since the days of FDR.
That crystallised a sense that had been building about Obama in the final weeks of his campaign: that he aspires to be not just a successful politician who wins elections, but a genuine leader - ready to steer his people through an onslaught of troubles. "America, we have come so far," he said, as if the entire nation were gathered before him. "We have seen so much. But there is so much more to do."
He also had a message to the rest of the world, one that will be welcomed almost everywhere. "To all those watching tonight from beyond our shores, from Parliaments and palaces to those who are huddled around radios in the forgotten corners of our world - our stories are singular, but our destiny is shared, and a new dawn of American leadership is at hand."
In this speech, and with his victory, Barack Obama has drawn a line under the last eight years, ending an American era that few will mourn. For today marked nothing less than the first day of the Obama presidency.
End of a long journey
Obama won at least 338 Electoral College votes, far more than the 270 he needed. With results in from more than three-quarters of US precincts, he led McCain by 52% to 47% in the popular vote.
McCain, a 72-year-old Arizona senator and former Vietnam War prisoner, called Obama to congratulate him and praised his rival's inspirational and precedent-shattering campaign.
"We have come to the end of a long journey," McCain told supporters. "I urge all Americans who supported me to join me in not just congratulating him but offering our next president our goodwill."
Blacks and whites celebrated together in front of the White House to mark Obama's win and Bush's imminent departure. Cars jammed the downtown Washington streets, with drivers honking their horns and leaning out their windows to cheer.
Thousands more joined street celebrations in New York's Times Square and in cities and towns across the United States.
"This is the most significant political event of my generation," said Brett Schneider (23) who was in the crowd for Obama's victory speech in Chicago.
"This is a great night. This is an unbelievable night," said US Representative John Lewis of Georgia, who was brutally beaten by police in Selma, Alabama, during a voting rights march in the 1960s.
He was at a celebration in Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, the home church of King, who led the civil rights movement and was murdered in 1968.
Reverend Jesse Jackson, a prominent civil rights leader and former presidential candidate, joined the celebrations in Chicago on Tuesday night, tears streaming down his cheeks.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2008, Reuters
http://www.mg.co.za/article/2008-11-05-obamas-victory-brings-a-new-dawn-of-leadership
Mother Jones:
Obama Wins and Redefines Real America
By David Corn
So who's a real American now?
With his decisive triumph over Senator John McCain, Senate Barack Obama made obvious history: he is the first black (or biracial) man to win the presidency. But the meaning of his victory-in which Obama splashed blue across previously red states-extends far beyond its racial significance. Obama, a former community organizer and law professor, won the White House as one of the most progressive (or liberal) nominees in the Democratic Party's recent history. Mounting one of the best run presidential bids in decades, Obama tied his support for progressive positions (taxing the wealthy to pay for tax cuts for working Americans, addressing global warming, expanding affordable health insurance, withdrawing troops from Iraq) to calls for cleaning up Washington and for crafting a new type of politics. Charismatic, steady, and confident, he melded substance and style into a winning mix that could be summed up in simple and basic terms: hope and change.
After nearly eight years of George W. Bush's presidency, Obama was the non-Bush: intelligent, curious, thoughtful, deliberate, and competent. His personal narrative-he was the product of an unconventional family and worked his way into the nation's governing class-fueled his campaign narrative. His story was the American Dream v2.0. He was change, at least at skin level. But he also championed the end of Bushism. He had opposed the Iraq war. He had opposed Bush's tax cuts for the rich. He was no advocate of let-'er-rip, free market capitalism or American unilateralism. In policy terms, Obama represents a serious course correction.
And more. In the general election campaign, McCain and his running mate, Sarah Palin, turned the fight for the presidency into a culture clash. They accused Obama of being a socialist. They assailed him for having associated with William Ayers, a former, bomb-throwing Weather Underground radical,who has since become an education expert. Palin indirectly referred to Obama's relationship with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, who once preached fiery sermons denouncing the United States government for certain policies. On the campaign trail, Palin suggested there were "real" parts of America and fake parts. At campaign events, she promoted a combative, black-helicopter version of conservatism: if you're for government expansion, you're against freedom. During her one debate with Democratic vice presidential nominee Joe Biden, she hinted that if her opponents won the White House there might come a day when kids would ask their grandparents what it had been like to live in a free country. At McCain-Palin rallies, supporters shouted out, "Communist!" and "terrorist!" and "Muslim!" when the Republican candidates referred to Obama. And McCain and Palin hurled the standard charges at Obama: he will raise your taxes and he is weak on national security.
Put it all together and the message was clear: there are two types of Americans. Those who are true Americans-who love their nation and cherish freedom-and those who are not. The other Americans do not put their country first; they blame it first. The other Americans do not believe in opportunity; they want to take what you have and give it to someone else. The other Americans do not care about Joe the Plumber; they are out-of-touch elitists who look down on (and laugh at) hard-working, church-going folks. The other Americans do not get the idea of America. They are not patriots. And it just so happens that the other America is full of blacks, Latinos, gays, lesbians, and non-Christians.
McCain, Palin and their compatriots did what they could to depict Obama as the rebel chief of this other un-American America. (Hillary Clinton helped set up their effort during the primaries by beating the Ayers drum.) Remember the stories of Obama's supposed refusal to wear a flag pin or place his hand over his heart for the Pledge of Allegiance? The emails about Obama being a secret Muslim? The goal was to delegitimize Obama, as well as the Americans who were moved by his biography, his rhetoric, and his ideas. It was back to the 1960s-drawing a harsh line between the squares (the real Americans) and the freaks (those redistribution-loving, terrorist-coddling faux Americans).
It didn't work.
With the nation mired in two wars and beset by a financial crisis, Obama mobilized a diverse coalition that included committed Democratic liberals turned on by his policy stands (unabashed redistributionists, no doubt) and less ideologically-minded voters jazzed by his temperament, meta-themes, and come-together message. He showed that the old Republican attack tactics do not always draw blood. A candidate could advocate raising taxes on wealthy individuals and corporations and withstand being called a socialist. A candidate could advocate talking to the nation's enemies and withstand being tagged weak and dangerous. A candidate could be non-white, have an odd name, boast a less-than-usual ancestry, be an unrepentant Ivy Leaguer, profess a quiet and thoughtful patriotism (that encompasses both love and criticism of country), and still be a real American. And become president.
How He Did It - The Primaries
From the start of the campaign, Obama and his advisers-notably campaign manager David Plouffe and chief strategist David Axelrod-shared a vision of how a freshman senator with relatively little national experience could reach the White House. Obama presented himself as an agent of change leading a movement for change. Given that a large majority of the voters believed the nation was heading in the wrong direction after two terms of George W. Bush, this was not the most brilliant of strategic strokes. But Obama had the chops to pull it off. He spoke well, he conveyed intelligence and energy, and he advocated policies that seemed like an antidote to the Bush years. And he effectively matched his own personal story (a best-selling book!) to this message of renewal.
Throughout the primaries, Obama addressed the sense of disenfranchisement Democrats and independents (and even some Republicans) had experienced during the W years. As these citizens watched Bush and Dick Cheney dole out tax cuts to the wealthy, do nothing about global warming, launch an optional war in Iraq, and expand secrecy and executive power, many felt locked out. It didn't help that Bush and his crowd appeared dismissive of those who disagreed with them, decrying elitism and playing to conservative know-nothingism. Obama came along and invited primary voters to join a crusade for change-which meant a crusade against them. It was a chance to strike back against the empire. Obama understood the need of many to reclaim their country. The right has often exploited such a sentiment. Think of the rise of the Moral Majority. But Obama was not playing the resentment card.
Crucial to his success was Obama's decision to keep anger (at least his own) out of the equation. For him and his supporters, there was cause to be damn mad. From their perspective, the country had been hijacked by Bush, Cheney and a small band of neocons. (A view they could hold with much justification.) But Obama appeared to have made a calculation: an angry black man could not win over a majority of the voters. He offered voters not fury, but hope. And considering his "improbable"-as he put it-rise, he was a natural pitchman for hope. Fixating on hope allowed him to talk about the problems of the United States (past and present) while remaining an optimist. Americans tend not to elect purveyors of doom and gloom to the presidency. Usually the candidate with the sunnier disposition wins. It's not hard to fathom why. When Americans select a president, many are voting for the person who they believe best reflects their own idea of America. Voting for president has a strong psychological component. It's how Americans define their nation. So personal attributes-character, strength, biography, personality-are important.
Obama described his presidential bid not as a campaign of outrage but as a cause of hope-a continuation of the grand and successful progressive movements of the past. For Democratic voters, he had the appropriate liberal policy stances. He had a record as a reformer in the Illinois state senate and the US Senate. But he provided more than resumé; he served up inspiration. Obama could advocate these policies-policies that often stir sharp partisan fights in Washington and beyond-and at the same time convincingly call for a new politics of productivity (not partisanship) in Washington. This took some talent. Mark Schmitt credits what he calls Obama's "communitarian populism"-a quiet, inclusive populism. Leave your pitchforks at the door. This message and his manner of delivering it led many Democratic voters to conclude that he was the right man for the post-Bush cleanup.
Obama had one big obstacle in the primaries: Hillary Clinton. She had a brand name that attracted and repulsed voters. She ran a conventional campaign. She uttered no talk of any movement. She relied on her resumé, and said she was ready to roll up her sleeves and work for you. Will you hire me as your advocate-in-chief? she asked. Obama was offering music; she was offering math. It was virtually a toss-up for the Democratic electorate. What made the difference was that Obama, the heady candidate, managed his campaign more effectively than Clinton, the down-to-earth candidate, managed hers. Clinton and her crew, after losing in Iowa and then fighting back in New Hampshire, botched the middle stretch and allowed Obama to rack up a series of wins that did give him-oh, that dreadful word-momentum. More important, her campaign seemed to bounce from one strategy to the next, as infighting roiled Clintonland. Not until the end of the primaries did Clinton get her groove back, winning over blue-collar voters in once-industrial states as the scrappy working-class hero. But it was too late. The delegate math became undeniable.
In beating Clinton, Obama showed that he had assembled a disciplined and skilled campaign staff. Not once was his campaign rocked by internal dissension. It never went through a staff shakeup. There were no media stories, relying on unnamed sources, revealing major disputes or fundamental disagreements at Obama HQ. ("We had our disagreements," says one top Obama aide. "But they were always within the confines of getting to the best decision. I was stunned by how well it all worked.") Consensus, smooth operations, no signs of turf fights or ego battles-this is virtually unheard of in a major modern presidential campaigns. Obama even handled his flip-flops-voting for the telecom immunity bill after vowing not to and opting out of public financing system after indicating he would remain within it-relatively well. The operation of his campaign sent a signal: Obama was a serious person who could ably handle pressure. Obama preached hope and at the same time he was the CEO of a well-managed enterprise that would raise and spend (in record amounts) hundreds of millions of dollars.
How He Did It -The General Election
Once it became clear that Obama and McCain would each be the presidential nominee of their respective parties, they faced two big tests-selecting a running mate and addressing the financial meltdown. Obama passed both; McCain failed both.
Obama's choice of Biden was not inspiring. It was, in a way, a conventional pick, a safe bet (relatively safe, given Biden's penchant for verbal slip-ups). Obama's campaign was predicated on the promise he would shake up Washington. Biden, a three-decade veteran of the Senate, was not known as a rebel. But he had deep foreign policy experience and had spent years courting the working-class voters of Delaware. He could reassure voters worried that Obama had not spent enough years toiling on national security matters. And Biden certainly would not compete with Obama for headlines and screen time. Obama was the inspiration on the ticket. Biden was the insurance policy.
By going with Biden, Obama dared to be boring and indicated he was willing to play it straight when necessary. He abided by the first rule of veep selection: do no harm. McCain took another route. He gambled. He picked a governor little-known on the national stage-a woman whom even McCain barely knew. It gave his campaign a shot of excitement and surprise. Her performance at the Republican convention was dazzling. But this high did not last, as Palin did miserably in media interviews. Several conservative columnists had to admit she was not ready for prime time. Within weeks, McCain's act of daring was widely perceived as an act of recklessness. Her approval ratings plummeted. Polls indicated she was a drag on a ticket and a prominent reason why some voters were not favoring McCain.
Palin was strike one. Strike two was McCain's erratic response to the financial crisis-saying different things, deciding to suspend his campaign but then suspending the suspension. His actions reinforced the impression created by the Palin misstep: he likes to shoot from the hip. But with the economy and Wall Street in a free fall, many voters were probably not eager for another cowboy president. Meanwhile, Obama, who met with establishment advisers and calmly backed the $700 billion bailout (which McCain also endorsed), looked like the adult in the room that crucial week, which culminated in the first debate. That face-off, according to the insta-polls, was a win for Obama, as were the next two confrontations.
Weeks into the general election, Obama had made a pivot-but so smoothly that most of the politerati did not even see it. He had gone from the inspiring movement leader calling for wholesale change in Washington to a reassuring figure who demonstrated that he could play well with the establishment. The younger and less experienced of the two nominees seemed better suited to handle a crisis. Iraq and national security were no longer the issues; the economy was. And Obama showed he possessed the steadier hand. At the final debate, as McCain jabbed with punches that packed not much punch, Obama came across as confident if not so dynamic. But when the world is cracking up, who wants pizzazz?
Losing on the economy front-and in the temperament contest-McCain, with Palin acting like his gun moll, stepped up his use of the standard GOP attack lines. He went back to basics. Obama, he contended, yearned to raise taxes not just on the rich but on everybody. Even though independent experts had concluded that middle-class voters would receive a bigger tax cut under Obama's proposal than McCain's, the McCain camp kept issuing charges about Obama's tax aims that were not true. They found a mascot in Joe the Plumber (who was not really named Joe and not really a plumber). And they whipped up the old tax-and-spend fear about Democrats.
"Now is no the time to experiment with socialism," Palin exclaimed at rallies, ignoring the fact that she presides over the socialistic state of Alaska (which redistributes tax revenues collected from oil companies to the state's citizens). She dubbed Obama "Barack the Wealth Spreader." At a McCain rally near St. Louis, Representative Todd Akin (R-MO) said, "This campaign in the next couple of weeks is about one thing. It's a referendum on socialism.” Senator George Voinovich (R-OH) weighed in on Obama: "With all due respect, the man is a socialist.” McCain repeatedly referred to Obama as the "redistributionist-in-chief," often stumbling over the phrase. He must have forgotten that during a 2000 campaign event, he was asked, "Are we getting closer and closer to, like, socialism," and McCain replied, "Here's what I really believe: That when you reach a certain level of comfort, there’s nothing wrong with paying somewhat more."
It was an anti-intellectual attack-taxes equals socialism-ignoring basic facts and the personal history of McCain (who was roundly accused by conservatives of engaging in "class warfare" in 2000 when he opposed George W. Bush's tax cuts for the rich). The point was to strike fear into the hearts of voters who make far less money than Obama's proposed threshold for tax hikes. McCain was not appealing to the better nature of voters.
Putting up a fierce fight, Obama did not make it personal. He paid tribute to McCain's military service. But he slammed McCain for standing with Bush on economic issues. "If you want to know where Senator McCain will drive this economy, just look in the rearview mirror," Obama told campaign audiences. And he challenged the Big Idea of the Republican Party:
The last thing we can afford is four more years of the tired, old theory that says we should give more to billionaires and big corporations and hope that prosperity trickles down to everyone else. The last thing we can afford is four more years where no one in Washington is watching anyone on Wall Street because politicians and lobbyists killed common-sense regulations. Those are the theories that got us into this mess. They haven't worked, and it's time for change.
Obama wasn't just taking on Bushism. He was taking on Reaganism.
McCain, Palin, and their supporters did make it personal. They claimed that Obama was misleading the voters, that he was not what he seemed. They argued that he was not up to the job. The McCain-Palin campaign ran a series of ads-one falsely asserted that Obama had supported teaching kindergartners "comprehensive sex education"-that various MSM outlets pronounced untruthful and unfair. The Straight Talk Express was derided as a cavalcade of misrepresentation. The McCain-Palin campaign revived the Bill Ayers attack. It tried to brand Obama an associate of anti-Semites, pointing to his relationship with a Palestinian scholar-without producing evidence that this Palestinian was anti-Semitic. (The International Republican Institute, a group chaired by McCain, had given over $400,000 to a group co-founded by this scholar.)
It was an ugly assault. Speaking in support of McCain and Palin, Representative Robin Hayes (R-NC) declared, "Liberals hate real Americans that work, and accomplish, and achieve, and believe in God." McCain supporters referred to Obama as "Barack Hussein Obama." At a Palin rally, Representative Steve King (R-IA) said that an Obama victory would cause the United States to turn into a “totalitarian dictatorship.” Representative Michele Bachmann (R-MN) declared that Obama was "anti-American." While she was at it, she urged the media to investigate and root out anti-Americanism within the US Congress.
This mud did not stick. Perhaps worse for McCain, his camp never presented a coherent strategic argument for its candidate. Obama had change and hope. McCain had no real case for McCain-other than he was a POW who put his country first. What did he want to do as president? Serve his country again. He essentially asked to be rewarded for his past service and sacrifice. He didn't feel the voters' pain; he wanted them to feel his. And his campaign ended up being defined mostly by its retro attack on Obama: he's an untested and untrustworthy liberal.
Most of the voters disagreed.
With his victory, Obama has ended the Bush II era with an exclamation point. (The Democratic gains in Congress seconded the point.) Now Obama faces a restoration project of unprecedented proportions. It may take years for him and the rest of Washington to remedy the ills neglected, exacerbated or caused by the Bush presidency. And he will have a tough time matching progress to promise. At his victory celebration in Chicago before tens of thousands, he lowered expectations: "the road ahead will be long. The climb ahead will be steep." And he noted that his electoral victory merely provided "only the chance for us to make that change."
But his barrier-breaking victory was indeed change in itself. Consider this: Obama ended his campaign at a rally on Monday night in Manassas, Virginia, the site of Battle of Bull Run, the opening land battle of the Civil War, in which Union troops were routed and forced to retreat back to Washington, DC There before a crowd of 90,000-young, old, black, white, affluent, working-class-Obama summed up his case:
Tomorrow, you can turn the page on policies that have put greed and irresponsibility before hard work and sacrifice. Tomorrow, you can choose policies that invest in our middle class and create new jobs, grow this economy so everybody has a chance to succeed, not just the CEO but the secretary and the janitor, not just the factory owner but the men and women who work the factory floors. And tomorrow, you can end to the politics that would divide a nation just to win an election, that pits region against region, city against town, Republican against Democrat, that asks us to fear at a time when we need to hope.
A black man on the verge of being elected president said that.
But race is just one part of the tale. Obama has done more than become a first. He has redrawn the electoral map (take that, Karl Rove) and reshaped the political culture of the United States. He has transformed the image of the United States-abroad and at home. (He vowed in Chicago that "a new dawn of American leadership is at hand.") Above all, after eight troubling years and after decades of ideological civil war, Obama has redefined what is real America. "Who knew that we were the Silent Majority?" his press secretary Linda Douglass said moments after Obama left the stage in Grant Park.
The voters who see President-elect Obama as the embodiment of their America can trade the Yes We Can motto for a new one: Yes We Are.
http://www.motherjones.com/mojoblog/archives/
2008/11/10690_obama_wins_real_america.html
Página/12:
Barack Obama, el final de un largo camino
En un escrutinio muy parejo, el triunfo demócrata en estados clave terminaba por inclinar la balanza
Al cierre de esta edición, Obama era el ganador en los estados decisivos de New Hampshire y Pennsylvania y disputaba cabeza a cabeza otros distritos y hacía muy difícil que McCain pudiera recuperarse. Como se esperaba, las comunidades negra y latina favorecían al candidato demócrata.
Por Santiago O’Donnell
Desde Chicago
Miércoles, 5 de Noviembre de 2008
Barack Obama (47) se encaminaba anoche hacia un triunfo electoral que lo convertiría en el primer presidente afroamericano de la historia de los Estados Unidos. Al cierre de esta edición, aún no se habían contado los votos en la mayoría de los estados importantes y las principales cadenas que cubren la elección no podían declarar un ganador. Pero los primeros triunfos de Obama en estados clave como New Hampshire y Pennsylvania, así como batallas reñidas en Florida, Virginia, Ohio e Indiana, parecían indicar que la leve ventaja de cinco o seis puntos que habían pronosticado los encuestadores podría alcanzar para una ajustada victoria del demócrata.
Fue la elección más larga y más cara de la historia de los Estados Unidos, salpicada de ataques y acusaciones, la primera en hacer uso intensivo de Internet tanto para recaudar como para comunicar y la primera en atraer a una generación de jóvenes que se había alejado de las urnas hace mucho tiempo.
En las horas previas a las elecciones ambos candidatos desplegaron su estrategia a ritmo febril, saltando de un lugar a otro del mapa desde la madrugada hasta después del último noticiero, el de las 11 de la noche. Con McCain intentando convencer a los votantes blancos de clase media de Ohio, Virginia y Pennsylvania que habían votado por Hillary Clinton en la primaria demócrata. Y con Obama, taladrando Indiana y Virginia, dos estados que no votan por un presidente demócrata desde Lyndon Johnson en el ’64. Los dos alternaban viajes a Colorado, Nevada y Nuevo México en el oeste, tres estados que venían votando republicano en las presidenciales pero que habían visto crecer sus poblaciones urbanas e hispanas y en los últimos años habían elegido congresistas y gobernadores demócratas.
Ambos repitieron el libreto de siempre, sin propuestas ni revelaciones de último momento. A diferencia del 2004, cuando la preocupación principal de los votantes fue la guerra de Irak, y en el 2006, cuando fue el terrorismo, este año el tema dominante fue la economía, seguido por la salud pública. El presidente George Bush alcanza records históricos de desaprobación y el noventa por ciento de los norteamericanos dice que no está conforme con el rumbo del país.
En este clima, cuando asoman las primeras señales de la anunciada recesión, McCain no pudo hablar mucho de sus planes bélicos ni de su programa para recortarle impuestos a los ricos. Del mismo modo Obama debió dejar en segundo plano las menciones a programa energético y su reforma impositiva. Y hace rato que ninguno habla del déficit, que se triplicará con el paquete de rescate que aprobó el Congreso. El debate se había agotado.
En sus últimos discursos, McCain sonaba solemne y nostálgico. “Yo he peleado por este país desde que tengo diecisiete años y no pasó un día sin que le agradezca a Dios por haber nacido en los Estados Unidos”, dijo ayer en una aparición en Boulder, Colorado. “Si ustedes me hacen presidente, les prometo que nunca los voy a decepcionar.”
Lo más sustancial de Obama en la últimas horas de campaña tuvo lugar durante la aparición de ambos candidatos en el entretiempo de Monday Night Football, el clásico partido de fútbol americano de los lunes por la noche.
McCain fue el primero en hablar y pidió penas más duras para los culpables de doping. A su turno, Obama propuso que de una vez por todas el campeonato universitario se defina con un playoff entre los ocho mejores equipos, y no como hasta ahora, que lo definen tres encuestas. “Acabemos con esa pavada de las encuestas”, dijo Obama, sacudiendo la palma de la mano en señal de disgusto. Fue suficiente para copar las portadas y los noticieros deportivos de ayer.
Las emociones empezaron a las siete de la tarde, hora del Este, cuando las pantallas de los noticieros explotaron con los primeros resultados, que luego empezarían a llegar como una catarata. Inmediatamente se supo que Kentucky había ido para McCain y Vermont para Obama. Ninguna sorpresa ahí. Primer indicador: Indiana prácticamente empatado. Un buen resultado para Obama, pero todavía faltaba mucho.
Los minutos pasaban y nada se definía. Una hora más tarde quedaba claro que Obama no la tendría fácil. En Indiana, Carolina del Norte, Ohio y Georgia, todos estados que aspiraba robarles a los republicanos, los resultados eran demasiado parejos como para declarar un ganador. Pero tampoco los ganaba McCain, por lo que la incertidumbre se prolongaba.
Los resultados llegaban todos juntos. Oklahoma para McCain. Illinois para Obama. Carolina del Sur para McCain. Nueva Inglaterra se pintaba de azul. En un minuto McCain lideraba en el conteo de delegados 21 a tres, diez minutos más tarde Obama tenía 72, contra 21 del republicano. Pero los estados clave, los decisivos, los que supuestamente estaban cabeza a cabeza, efectivamente estaban cabeza a cabeza. Ohio, Florida, Missouri, Carolina del Norte, Indiana, todos trababan la tendencia al no decidirse por uno u otro. Faltaba mucho para asegurarse los 20 votos necesarios para asegurar la nominación. La noche se estira.
A las ocho y once anuncian que New Hampshire va para Obama. Es un estado que McCain visitó muchas veces en los últimos días. Podía ser un indicio para Obama, pero de apenas cuatro votos electorales. Después llegó el triunfo demócrata en Pennsylvania, el estado azul que McCain más había atacado por sentirlo vulnerable. Junto a New Hampshire, empezaba a confirmar la ventaja para Obama que habían marcado las encuestas electorales. Poco a poco la posibilidad de una sorpresa se diluía.
A las nueve de la noche la suerte parecía echada y la cadena CBS entrevistaba al reverendo L. N. Patterson pastor de una iglesia de Birmingham, Alabama, que había marchado con Martin Luther King durante el movimiento de derechos civiles en los ’60, marchas pacíficas que fueron reprimidas con manguerazos y asaltos de perros policiales. “Sin esas mangueras y sin esos perros no estaríamos acá”, dijo. “Por eso estoy tan contento” .
© 2000-2008 www.pagina12.com.ar|Todos los Derechos Reservados
http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/elmundo/4-114522-2008-11-05.html
The Independent:
The upstart with a dream
One year ago, he was behind in the polls and his campaign was being written off. Leonard Doyle reports on how Obama upset the odds
Wednesday, 5 November 2008
Two large military gunships swooped across the inky blackness of a Virginia sky as Barack Obama's motorcade drove into view, flanked by 12 motorcycle outriders. He would not become president-elect for a further 21 hours or so, but it already felt like the torch had been handed over.
Knowing victory was within his grasp, Mr Obama dispensed with much of his stock speech on Monday night, to reflect on the vicissitudes of the campaign. A little more than a year ago, he recalled, he was far behind in the polls, unable even to secure the endorsement of many black politicians who figured he could never beat Hillary Clinton. Many in the US political and media establishment had also concluded that his campaign was a flash in the pan. He was all but written off as a talented but fundamentally inexperienced upstart.
But the story of Barack Obama is one of being constantly underestimated by his opponents. From his earliest days as a community organiser on the south side of Chicago he revealed a talent for motivating people who thought they were powerless. As a young politician, hungry with thwarted ambition, his intellect, self-confidence, astonishing networking skills and a capacity to charm people into supporting him, turned him from a lowly Illinois state senator into a political superstar.
His election remains nevertheless a story of extraordinary talent and self-discipline, along with some fortunate timing. With a first name that rhymes with Iraq, a middle name of the former dictator of that country and a surname that even American television anchors confuse with Osama Bin Laden, the 47-year-old Chicago politician was always going to be a hard sell with America's so-called "low information" voters.
But if one theme has emerged from his meteoric rise from community organiser in the Chicago ghetto to the mansion on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, it is his capacity to turn apparently fatal weaknesses into powerful political weapons.
Exactly a year ago this week, Mr Obama was lagging 33 points behind Mrs Clinton in the opinion polls, and his supporters were in despair. Two gut-wrenching presidential election losses to George Bush in a row had taught Democrats that a winning candidate needed to retaliate against attacks quickly if he was to avoid the fate of John Kerry and Al Gore. The pundits concluded that the Democratic race was all but over, and national magazines had already put Mrs Clinton's face on their covers as the presumptive Democratic nominee. The polls, and the money pouring into her war chest, told them she had to win, but they did not count on the tsunami of enthusiasm that the Obama campaign would unleash.
Yet, as he headed into the crowded contest for the Democratic nomination, the Illinois Senator had several advantages over his opponents. He was the ultimate outsider at a time when voters were desperate for change in the way Washington is run. And as a politician who had never benefited from the patronage of a political machine, he knew how to operate on a shoestring. It was also Senator Obama's good fortune that Mr Bush's eight-year term proved such a disaster.
By opposing the Iraq war, well before the 2003 invasion, Mr Obama got on the right side of history and sowed the seeds for a robust but thoughtful foreign policy. "I am not opposed to all wars. I am opposed to dumb wars," he said in autumn 2002, a position which enabled him to outflank even Republicans by calling for stepped-up military action in Afghanistan and even against al-Qa'ida inside Pakistan.
None of this seemed decisive, however, when all six Democratic candidates rolled into Des Moines, Iowa, on a bitterly cold night early last November to attend the Jefferson Jackson Dinner, as tedious an event as can be found in an election-year calendar. The national media was mostly absent as 9,000 raucous supporters – most wearing Obama's "Change" T-shirts, packed a boxing arena to watch Democratic big shots arrayed around a centre stage tuck into dinnerThe Clinton campaign dismissed the enthusiasm of the youthful Obama fans, saying they had all been bussed in from Chicago for the night. It was a fateful error of judgement, by a campaign that already reeked of a sense of entitlement. Because the "JJ dinner" as Democratic insiders call it, would turn out to be a game-changer.
The first five would-be candidates rattled through their stump speeches. Mr Obama was last to speak. Deadlines had already passed for television news and most newspapers. People were already leaving the hall. But the first-term Senator from Illinois sprinted on to the stage and gave a barnstorming speech. His supporters were delighted, but crucially, so were potential big-money backers, who saw for the first time that he could throw a punch.
The Iraq war, "should have never been authorised and should have never been waged," Senator Obama said. "We have a chance to bring the country together to tackle problems that George Bush made far worse, and that festered long before George Bush took office." That was an implied criticism of Bill Clinton, then still revered by most of the party, but his next words dealt a stinging blow to Mrs Clinton's candidacy.
"When I am the nominee of this party," said Mr Obama, "the Republican nominee will not be able to say I voted for the war in Iraq, or that I gave George Bush the benefit of the doubt on Iran, or that I support Bush-Cheney policies of not talking to leaders that we don't like." The only headline that mattered next day was in the Des Moines Register. David Yepsen, the paper's influential political editor, lavished praise on his speech and predicted an instant buzz across Iowa, where the first contest of the 2008 election would be held in eight weeks. "Should he come from behind to win the Iowa caucuses," he wrote, "Saturday's dinner will be remembered as one of the turning-points in his campaign here."
A month later, 18,000 people gave up their Saturday afternoon to drive through the snow and ice to Des Moines to watch Oprah Winfrey endorse the Obama bid and listen to hours of political rhetoric.
As David Broder, the veteran political writer of The Washington Post wrote this week, "In the eight Iowa caucus campaigns I'd covered over four decades, I'd never seen anything like this. In fact I'd not seen voters so turned on since my first campaign as a political reporter, the classic Kennedy-Nixon race of 1960."
Barack Obama has never been short of ambition, but as recently as 2004 he was unknown outside Illinois. Although by then he had spent eight years in the state senate, a brash attempt to win a safe Democratic seat in Congress ended in humiliation when he was badly beaten by a former Black Panther named Bobby Rush. He was still teaching at the University of Chicago Law School, and was up to his neck in student loans which he only managed to pay off in 2006.
But John Kerry had spotted the urbane young politician during his doomed presidential campaign against George Bush, and asked Mr Obama to give the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic Convention. His oratory not only helped revive a party which at the time was directionless and adrift, it swept him into the US Senate the same year, where he soon began positioning himself for a run for the presidency.
To Mrs Clinton's backers – and not only to them – it seemed ludicrously presumptuous. But in Iowa they discovered their mistake. While she was flying an expensive "Hillacopter" around the state, Senator Obama and his team logged tens of thousands of miles persuading rural white Iowans to back him. Through word of mouth and the efforts of his devoted followers, he won a state that is 95 per cent white.
And while Mrs Clinton depended on friends in the establishment to help her through the election, Mr Obama was busy building a grass-roots movement. He turned to the internet to raise money and used the explosion of online social networking tools to sign up and motivate an army of volunteers.
Time and again during the primaries, and the election campaign, that followed, Mr Obama showed his coolness under fire. When Mrs Clinton snatched victory in New Hampshire, setting the scene for a long and bruising campaign that went on for almost six months, he was not fazed. When his controversial pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, was exposed as a virulent anti-white demagogue, he delivered what many said was the most historically sophisticated speech on race relations since the death of Martin Luther King.
Some of the mishaps were of his own making. Condescending remarks he made about working class white voters "clinging to guns and religion" were a gift to his opponents, and even though he secured the Democratic nomination, he was polling 20 and 30 percentage points behind John McCain in must-win states like Ohio. Senator McCain's campaign was not slow to sow doubt about the first black major-party candidate for president, with millions of so-called robocalls telling targeted voters that like Osama Bin Laden, he had plotted with a domestic terrorist, Bill Ayers, who tried to bomb the Pentagon. In fact he had served on the board of an education charity with Mr Ayers, who later became a Chicago University education professor, but the smears had some impact.
Mr Obama's most grievous error followed Russia's invasion of Georgia in August, which Senator McCain exploited ruthlessly. Senator Obama's failure to condemn Russia's action – he blamed both sides for the invasion – reminded voters of Hillary Clinton's famous "3am phone call" advertisement in which she warned that Mr Obama was not ready for leadership. The polls turned in Mr McCain's favour for the first time in the race.
Mr McCain's decision to play the wildest card of the campaign, naming Alaska's governor Sarah Palin as his running-mate, stole all the thunder. As the presidential debates loomed, one poll gave Mr McCain a five-point lead. It was a margin he was not to enjoy again. The sudden crisis that engulfed the financial markets dealt a fatal one-two to the Republican campaign. It reinforced the point Mr Obama had been making all year: that the decisions of the Bush and Clinton administrations to remove regulatory oversight from Wall Street had led directly to the sub-prime mortgage crisis.
The second blow was self-inflicted. Mr McCain's claim that the US economy was "fundamentally sound" made him a laughing-stock; worse, with the economy going through convulsions, working class white voters, some 45 per cent of the electorate, began to reappraise their rejection of Mr Obama and look past their prejudices.
At his final Virginia rally, grieving for the grandmother who raised him, and who had died that morning, Mr Obama reflected on the harsh attacks he had endured on the campaign trail. He described a grim journey he made to South Carolina, looking for an endorsement at a time when his campaign was floundering. While he was introducing himself, a small woman began interrupting with the chant, "Fired Up!" followed a moment later with "Ready To Go!" It lifted his mood that day and became the catch cry of the campaign.
"That's how this thing started," he said, "It shows you what one voice can do. One voice can change a room, and if a voice can change a room it can change a city, and if it can change a city, it can change a state, and if it can change a state it can change a nation, and if it can change a nation, it can change the world."
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/the-upstart-with-a-dream-992812.html
The Nation:
President Obama: This Proud Moment
comment
By William Greider
November 4, 2008
We are inheritors of this momentous victory, but it was not ours. The laurels properly belong to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and all of the other martyrs who died for civil rights. And to millions more before them who struggled across centuries and fell short of winning their freedom. And to those rare politicians like Lyndon B. Johnson, who stood up bravely in a decisive time, knowing how much it would cost his political party for years to come. We owe all of them for this moment.
Whatever happens next, Barack Obama has already changed this nation profoundly. Like King before him, the man is a great and brave teacher. Obama developed out of his life experiences a different understanding of the country, and he had the courage to run for president by offering this vision. For many Americans, it seemed too much to believe, yet he turned out to be right about us. Against all odds, he persuaded a majority of Americans to believe in their own better natures and, by electing him, the people helped make it true. There is mysterious music in democracy when people decide to believe in themselves.
Waiting for the results, we all felt nagging tension, even when we were fairly sure of the outcome. I heard from a newspaper friend, a wise old reporter who never gave in to Washington cynicism. "This election eve night," he wrote, "I feel myself tingling about the prospect of a nation which used to lynch blacks during my lifetime electing a black man president. I so hope it happens, believe it would electrify the world. I think he is the bravest man in the world, perhaps the most foolish one as well.... I worry about him like a Jewish mama."
We heard from another family friend, an African-American woman who teaches law in North Carolina. She reported weeping involuntarily when she saw Obama's picture. Did she know why? She said she saw her adolescent son's face in Obama's. Great moments in history give emotional definition to our lives and we carry those feelings forward with us, our own private meaning of events.
In this way, Obama redefined the country for us, but our responses involved generational differences. For younger people, white and black, his vision seemed entirely straightforward. It is the country they already know, and they expressed great enthusiasm. Finally, they said, a politician who recognizes the racial differences that are part of their lives and no big deal. For young blacks and other minorities, Obama's place at the pinnacle of official power lifts a coarse cloak that has blanketed their lives and dreams-the stultifying burden of being judged, whether they succeed or fail, on the basis of their race.
For others of us at an advanced age, Obama's success is more shocking. We can see it as a monumental rebuke to tragic history-the ultimate defeat of "white supremacy." That vile phrase was embedded in American society (even the Constitution) from the outset and still in common usage when some of us were young. Now it is officially obsolete. Racism will not disappear entirely, but the Republican "Southern strategy" that marketed racism has been smashed. Americans will now be able to see themselves differently, North and South, white and black. The changes will spread through American life in ways we cannot yet fully imagine. Let us congratulate ourselves on being alive at such a promising moment.
About William Greider
National affairs correspondent William Greider has been a political journalist for more than thirty-five years. A former Rolling Stone and Washington Post editor, he is the author of the national bestsellers One World, Ready or Not, Secrets of the Temple, Who Will Tell The People, The Soul of Capitalism (Simon & Schuster) and-due out in February from Rodale-Come Home, America.
Copyright © 2008 The Nation
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20081117/greider_election
ZNet:
An Interview I Would Love To Read
By Michael Albert
November, 05 2008
Imagine it is January 2, 2011.
Imagine that Barack Obama has been President of the U.S. for two full years.
Finally, imagine also that the following interview with Obama takes place on prime time TV, as a way of situating what has occurred over those two years and also to foreshadow what is forthcoming.
And since this is all make believe, let's make believe the interviewer's name is Barb Walt.
I believe what follows is not an absolutely impossible scenario for all times, though I don't believe it will happen in the next two years. I don't believe Barack Obama will take office with the views that I here place in his mouth or with the courage to act on those views I attribute to him. But I could be wrong, and of course I hope I am, and more importantly, it could happen another time.
I know that a great many people, unlike me, believe that Obama is absolutely sincere about empowering the working people, women, minorities, and young people of America, even at the expense of those with wealth and power.
Against all evidence of Obama's own words, of the forces he is beholden to, of the inclinations of the "experts" he is welcoming into his administration, of the system preserving pressures he feels every day, and of past U.S. history - many people have an elated feeling that this man will transform the country. I fervently hope they are right, but think they are wrong. I offer this essay to indicate what I think would justify their outlook.
Obama will be transformative, or not.
That's a given, like it will rain tomorrow or not.
So...
Either: like Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, Barack Obama will be a man elected into office with major elite backing, who when he became President was only a sincere reformer, but who was then polarized by elite resistance and inspired by popular activism, to become much more.
Or: unlike Chavez but like every past American President, Obama will not evolve into holding more radical views, will not stand up to conforming pressures, and will not learn from activists, but will instead oppose us.
Since many Obama voters anticipate the former outcome, the imagined interview below reveals what it might be like if things turn out as they hope. It describes what having a radicalized president with great courage might be like.
But if the future holds no interview remotely like the one below, and no Obama transformation remotely like the one described, and no President-inspired uprising like that reported, and if instead Obama becomes an eloquent mainstream solidifier of elite stability, then it will mean Obama has fallen way short of his supporters' hopes, and it will mean it is incumbent on all who wanted a much more transformative outcome to keep pushing Obama's administration and to keep building the activist means to move forward even as Obama becomes more of an obstacle than an aid to the task.
Which way will it turn out?
Will Obama galvanize efforts to transform society including becoming a movement builder against elite opposition?
Or will Obama settle into office as a system sustainer, defending elite agendas with only modest (albeit important) variations from recent administrations?
We will see.
Below, we see what the transformative scenario might look like. My point is that we should push as hard as we are able to make the transformative path real, but we should also persist in our movement building even if Obama is more obstacle than ally.
Barb: Mr. President...
Barack: Barb, please, don't call me that - call me Barack. I think that "Mr. President" stuff is a throwback to Royal pomp. We should get beyond that...
Barb: Okay, sorry, Mr., er, Barack. To get started - I would like to understand your plans and hopes now, but also where you and the country have been over these past two years, and where you are now going. Can you start by telling us your broad goals as they were when you took office, two years ago?
Barack: Sure, Barb, I can summarize my aims as they were then...
Barb: Good, let's consider it a historical record. After the summary we can address recent changes. How about we start with health care?
Barack: It was my feeling when I took office that a society that doesn't provide health care for all citizens is dysfunctional. I mean, what would you say about a family that took care of some sick members, but told others, too bad, make do?
And if everyone in a family wanted to take care of all members, except an old curmudgeon granddaddy who said screw those who can't pay, clearly that old fuddy duddy's perverse opinion would be ignored, right?
So, by analogy, I felt we should treat all citizens like members of a diverse family, with everyone entitled to health care. And I felt if we raised the moral tone of the country, the curmudgeons opposing universal health care would be ignored.
I also knew health costs were climbing so fast the financial crisis we recently endured would be minor compared to the distributional crisis that would ensue if we left the health system in its prior condition. So I intended to ensure full coverage, but at a cost within our social means, by having everyone together take on the responsibility.
I intended to increase the number of caregivers, reduce their incomes to a sensible level, and in particular, put a low lid on pharmaceutical companies, health care facilities, or other involved firms profiting off disease.
I thought we should have vastly more clinics, too, because how else would people, and especially the poor, have easy access to timely and excellent care.
And, I have to say, I also always wondered, what the hell is the purpose of the incredible pressure that is put on interns? What logic justifies the debilitating hours they are forced to work? I thought that was no way to provide health care, much less to train capable, sensitive doctors, and you know, Michelle in her hospital work, had similar impressions, but I didn't know what we might do about it.
Barb: What about employment?
Barack: My view about jobs was why should someone who wants to work not be able to? Why should one person be working full time, or even very long hours at multiple jobs, and others not working at all? Why not share however much work needs doing more equally, to everyone's gain?
I also thought if someone doesn't have the literacy or other training needed to do work, that would be a fair reason for their not having a job except that almost always a training or knowledge deficit isn't a revelation about the job applicant, but about a society that denied a capable person of the learning he or she should have had. So I felt that we should redress educational denials rather than penalize their victims with unemployment.
I also wondered why some people suffered very harsh and demanding work conditions, even degrading, dangerous, and damaging conditions - while other people enjoyed much better and sometimes even uplifting conditions. And the former even got less pay. In other words, why did some people work so long and so hard for so little, while other people got off much easier and were paid way more? Was this moral? Was it good economics? I had my doubts.
So, I wanted, even two years ago, full employment plus being sure that people had education and training to enable them to do their jobs well and, down the road, perhaps we could also take a look at how and what people got paid for their efforts.
Barb: Public schooling?
Barack: I wanted the next generation to get an excellent education in a nurturing, supportive, and enjoyable environment. And I wanted the people responsible for conveying that education well provided for, both with equipment and wages. I didn't want kids bored and intimidated at school, but, instead, inspired and uplifted. No more warehousing; I wanted real teaching.
I knew that richer districts historically had better schools, due to the tax base difference, and I was dead set against that. What sense did it make to have a gap in income between neighborhoods made larger as time passed, rather than being diminished as time passed?
So even on taking office, I rejected saddling youth in poorer neighborhoods with deficits while youth in richer neighborhoods enjoyed advantages. I wanted to universalize the best education.
I also thought we ought to do something for older folks who wanted to make up for prior gaps in their schooling. To have a society with as much functional illiteracy as we had, some say well over 50% of us can't read a book, was wrong, and should be redressed as a high priority.
While we are on education, I also thought we should make higher education accessible to all who could make good use of it, and simultaneously enrich higher education to graduate the most enlightened and skilled generation we could.
I thought, like many other problems, that our lagging science and our general educational malaise was simply a function of the decades of slash and burn market fundamentalism since Reagan, and certainly those policies did greatly aggravate the situation, but I also had an inkling of a larger insight because I didn't understand how even Republican market worshipers could not be horrified by the horrendous results of their policies. It was one thing to be wrong, fair enough. But how could they persist despite seeing the horrible schooling that resulted?
Barb: What about your initial take on the legal system?
Barack: Here I knew from lots of personal experience, mine and Michelle's, that the legal system was a mess. Lawyers and prosecutors, in civil and criminal cases, were engaged in a kind of demented dance, driven more by cronyism, favors, crowded dockets, and prejudice, than by seeking justice, much less rehabilitation, and the price for this dysfunctional chaos was almost always paid by poorer and weaker defendants, not by those with wealth and power.
The criminal justice system was harsh, uncaring, racist, classist, brutal, often without even a semblance of logic. Everyone knows it. In fact, the prison system seemed to me to be almost a school for crime, not a means of redressing and reducing crime. But I didn't have much notion what to do about it, except, on one front.
Thus, even two years ago, I knew that having the gargantuan levels of arrests that we did, largely for victimless crimes, was horrible for those criminalized and also wasted huge resources in a gargantuan prison system that was eating funds that could go to education, housing, etc. I thought we should look at European procedures and by emulating them we could avoid imprisoning people for victimless crimes, at no loss in justice or prevention.
I knew prison guard unions would oppose reducing incarceration rates, unless we provided new jobs, so we would have to do that too, of course. But I admit I dismissed as paranoid the grass roots formulations I constantly ran into that said, wait, the harsh criminal justice system in poor neighborhoods aren't just irrational bureaucratic gargoyles. They impose control and repression that prevents the poor from rising and taking a greater share of society's wealth. Later, I learned from the poor, rather than considering them ignorant.
Barb: Legislation?
Barack: I had no really significant notion of how to do law making differently, even after having served in the Senate, but I did know we had to attain much higher popular participation in lawmaking and redress the power imbalance between normal citizens and lobbyists for the rich and powerful.
We needed some way that everyday folks could have more say, more oversight, more comprehension, but I didn't have good ideas about what the steps toward that might be.
Barb: Distribution of wealth?
Barack: Perhaps you remember this becoming a mantra for McCain near the end of the campaign? I found it a bit absurd, I have to admit, and yet in retrospect McCain did have a point, though it was a point I didn't yet see clearly.
I mean, even worse than my not knowing precisely where my views were going to wind up, and therefore not initially accepting and embracing the idea of redistribution - you probably also notice that during the campaign I didn't talk about my views as I am relaying them to you now. Why was that? Was I a typical political liar not revealing myself fully?
Barb: I admit, I was going to ask you about lying, as you put it, a bit later, after surveying the rest of your initial views...
Barack: Well, I think I should answer that now, and the answer is yes, in some sense I was a political liar. But what choice was there? If I had expressed all the above views which I felt at the time as I am expressing them for you here tonight, however moderate and sensible they were, I would have been skewered into little pieces by CNN and FOX and all the rest of the media.
I knew that much, even before the past two years experience taught me more about the lengths to which various elite sectors will go to prevent changes. I thought then, however, that having to remain quiet about a big part of my beliefs was just a residue of the way media and elections work. It was something to fix later - but certainly not something I could overcome during the campaign itself.
So instead of telling the whole truth, as I have with you, tonight, back during the campaign I felt if I was going to get elected, while I shouldn't overtly lie, still, I did have to be very judicious about how I expressed myself, always guarding against being misrepresented or even pilloried for views most people would support given time to think them through.
So, I was judicious, and some would say, not without justification, duplicitous. I am not proud of that, though I think a good case can be made that in context it was the right choice. After all, if I had presented my full views like I have been doing to you, tonight, then McCain would have won and the country would be in a very different place now.
But as to McCain's charge about redistributing wealth, that was incredible. After all, the Republicans had spent decades redistributing wealth upward from working people to owners, and that kind of redistribution was fine with McCain.
I thought instead that we had to give people who had only meager possessions more stake and more comfort, rather than taking wealth from them to give people who already had yachts and mansions even more yachts and mansions.
So yes, I felt that taxing the wealthy was part of what was needed, not least to redress what had occurred for a few decades. I didn't think of it as redistribution - though of course it is.
Barb: Wages?
Barack: To me it was obscene for wealthy businesses to pay paltry wages to hard working folks on grounds that the workers don't have the power to take more.
If I own some factory and I can get away with paying my workers less, I will. That's obscene. What I didn't really understand two years ago was that it wasn't just a personal failing of the owner, but was instead systemic. Even a nice and caring owner, and there are plenty of those, had to cut salaries or get out competed.
So, yes, I knew two years ago that I wanted working people to get higher wages for their labor.
Barb: Working conditions?
Again, what possible morality could justify a financially solvent company maintaining horrible conditions, or even opting to make conditions worse, just to cut costs so that owners could do even better?
To me, that was vulgar, but even with my heart in the right place, I was missing that market competition makes it necessary to do this kind of thing to ward off competitive failure, so that it was market competition, not the mindset of the employers, that was the root of the problem.
So, two years back I knew I wanted to promote laws, union activism, etc., to improve people's lives at work, but I had nothing more than that in mind.
Barb: The general direction of the economy? Were you a socialist two years ago?
Not even close. I felt that since its inception the American political tradition had been reformist, not revolutionary. And that meant to me that for a political leader to get things done, he or she should ideally be ahead of the curve, but not too far ahead. I was just a sincere advocate for the rights and conditions of the worst off folks in society. I wasn't about eliminating private ownership of workplaces - that never crossed my mind.
I did think markets needed stringent regulation to avoid doing great harm, so I wanted, to shift away from market fundamentalism and toward stewardship by government, but I wasn't even anti capitalist. In fact, I thought anti capitalists were unrealistic, childish, utopian. Worst of all they were not relevant to our unemployed citizens, or those who have bad jobs, or lack health care, or who breath toxic emissions. It was only later that I came to see things differently, as I guess we are going to come to...
Barb: Yes, we will, but first, what about War and peace?
Such matters seemed pretty simple to me. I mean, I always thought it was ironic for McCain and Palin to say I was untested or inexperienced regarding international relations. Is the horrendous prior behavior that McCain called "experience," a positive credential? The real issue was orientation.
Am I sane, or not? If I am, then I care about human likes and potentials, and I want peace - and I want it so much that I will go the extra step, indeed a thousand extra steps, to try to get it.
Well, wait, I guess honestly, I have to admit that that is more me now, then it was me back during the election, or at least my public face back then. Because while running I was hawkish about Afghanistan wasn't I, and even about Pakistan. I think it was part of getting elected, and at the moment to deliver the scary message well, I made myself believe it.
When I took office, however, I did want to initiate negotiations with countries who at that time I thought represented potential and even real problems for us, including North Korea, Iran, Iraq, and the Mideast writ large, China, and Venezuela, though in the campaign I did mostly just talk tough about Venezuela and especially Afghanistan. And when I got elected I did believe we could negotiate sensible relations, at least, and maybe more. Why not?
Barb: But you didn't see the U.S. as a problem state itself, internationally?
No, not at all.
I thought we made mistakes, sure, even big mistakes, but I didn't think of us as being a problem rather than a solution - even though I would have agreed we were ham-handed at times. In fact, I think I was incapable of thinking that our motives might not be worthy. That came later...
Barb: What about gender issues?
You know, there is a sense in which I was just a person who cared about people. I know that sounds trite, but it was true. I wasn't focused on changing basic structures. I just wanted to push policies and provide an example that would elevate people who needed relief.
So, regarding women, I wanted absolute and full equality, fairness in all sides of life, and also dignity, including no more minimization and objectification - and I wanted the same for people with diverse sexual preferences, gays, lesbians, and others.
Thus, I intended to push for serious and effective day care, child leave, and other programs that women seek and need. But I also wanted to provoke a widespread discussion in society, not unlike what happened in the early days of the women's movement, addressing the causes of women suffering psychologically and materially, and then trying to overcome those causes.
Barb: Issues of race?
Of course no one should suffer in any way, personally or institutionally, due to their race, religion, or any other cultural community they may be part of.
So my views regarding race when I got elected were like my views regarding gender - I wanted to eliminate archaic laws and provisions that interfered with people's options due to cultural biases.
I also wanted to redress residual inequalities between communities so that all communities would have comparable per capita assets and conditions, of course. I thought affirmative action made sense, but not reparations, at least not at the outset.
Barb: Ecology?
Honestly, I wasn't much of a student of ecology. I didn't know much, and I still have a lot to learn.
I did know, however - indeed, how could any sane person not know - that it made no sense to squander resources frivolously, it made no sense to ruin the environment we lived in, it made no sense to ignore climate change and suffer incalculable consequences later.
So I wanted to elevate ecological attention and program to a priority, but I felt we needed to first figure what our ecological program ought to be.
Barb: Okay, when you were elected, two years ago, what was your expectation about fulfilling your aims? What obstacles did you expect to encounter? Did you think you would overcome them?
During the campaign we built an immense apparatus for reaching out to people all over the country and I thought we would use that, and use my access to media and to the public through speeches, etc., to clarify what we sought to do, and to amass huge support for it, and to then implement it.
I knew that many programs would encounter serious opposition. Many wealthy people would oppose paying more taxes, or would oppose having programs that took from the social product on behalf of working people for social services like education and health - though, honestly, I didn't entirely understand why.
I also knew that many people with strong ideological commitments would oppose my plans around health, science, regulating markets, etc.
But with the tremendous outreach team we had developed in the campaign reconceived to be an activist apparatus for discovering, arousing, and fighting for people's desires, and with me and other administration members appearing actively on the media and having my own show as well to talk directly to the public, I thought that despite inevitable opposition, the massive ground swell of clarity, excitement, energy, and desire we would unearth and inspire, would be enough to carry the day. Indeed, I thought we would make quick progress.
After all, we had already done the impossible, in the election. This seemed like an easier task, with the White House in hand, not a harder one.
Barb: In hindsight, now, what do you think people expected you to actually do when you took office?
It depends who you are talking about. I think the public, the broad public was a mixed bag on this.
Many working people and especially young people believed and certainly hoped I would do much of what I have mentioned here, and were happy when they began to realize I wanted to do even more.
Many other people, however, doubted anything much would be done, but at least I wouldn't be McCain or Bush.
For people who voted against me, on the other hand, I think there was confusion, doubt, and sometimes fear and hatred, but I thought we could mostly defuse it and turn it around.
Elites I guess I thought similarly about, but I quickly discovered, instead, that they thought, and this was whether they voted for me or against me, that I would do nothing much different than had been done before. And not only did they think that would be true, they were intent to make it true.
Barb: What did you in fact seek to do, and what did you encounter as a result? How were you surprised? What did it do to your views?
Well, if you remember, the first thing I did was to announce some new cabinet positions - ecology and science. And then I announced a massive campaign around education and health care - with a massive literacy campaign and many new community clinics - and then I started announcing many economic regulations, and urging a campaign for few work hours, and I began undertaking international negotiations. It was just what you would expect, I guess, in light of the things I said above about my views at the outset.
What I encountered, however, came as a big surprise. On the one hand, as you know, there was an incredible outpouring of popular energy and excitement which latched onto what was offered and pushed for much more, as well. These millions of people - the women and men energetically fighting to end the war, to enlarge democracy, to improve people's lives - not only impressed me, they pushed me, they made me study their sentiments, and made me react to their choices.
But on the other side, the negative response was even more incredible, and at least to me, more surprising, especially the speed and vigor with which I was publicly pilloried, both to my face, at first, in my offices, and then once that failed, all over the media. I was attacked, and attacked, and attacked, as were the emerging movements, too.
At first it was pretty slow and private as people came to see me and talked with me - senators, big industrialists, and so on - but what happened at these sessions was, well, I said back to them, hey, wait a minute. I told you broadly all during the campaign what my priorities were. And yes, my views go somewhat further than what I said in the campaign, but not much. So what's the problem for you? And I also told them, one after another, that I didn't get into office to do nothing. I intended to bring changes, just like I said I would. I am no revolutionary, not even a radical, I told them, but we need to act on many fronts, for many constituencies.
Well, once this was conveyed, then the newspapers and talk shows and networks that these folks govern ratcheted up the attacks. And it really went over the top, it went ballistic, you remember, when I met with Chavez and reported that instead of feeling he was some horrible enemy, like I had convinced myself during the campaign, I found that I liked a whole lot of what the Venezuelans were doing, and even wanted to learn from their efforts. At that point, all hell broke lose. The media got really aggressive from then on.
It was incredibly fortunate that we did have a powerful campaign apparatus that we could shift into combating all the lies and calumny these elites were pouring out and, even more important, that the public, all over the country, showed so much support for our new programs.
Indeed, I have to admit, I doubt I would have had the courage or the insight to keep on, except for the huge numbers of folks who took to the streets and went house to house, and otherwise worked tirelessly to keep pushing the debate forward against the elite assault on us. How could I possibly let them down?
Well, okay this went on as everyone knows for months and months, and it still continues, and instead of abating, or becoming civil, it has escalated, and it still is. The more I do in accord with serving the population, the more the elite owned media and talk show hosts and pundits and other politicians attack me in all kinds of ways.
And for your question, from all that, plus the lessons I was finally listening to that movement organizers were teaching, I learned that our society is fundamentally flawed in that it produces people who act as these hostile talk show hosts, newspaper publishers, senators and corporation owners and executives did, and it not only produces them, it elevates them to great power and wealth - indeed, it connects their power and wealth and their attitudes - making each the condition of the other. And so I began to change my views, and from then on the change in my thinking went very quick, I admit, once it got going.
I began to realize that we had bad schools because 80% of each new generation learning mostly to endure boredom and to take orders kept people at the top insulated and advantaged.
I realized that we had bad health care and harsh legality because it weakened most working people, and allowed those above to dominate and claim more for themselves.
I won't go through everything I learned - but suffice it to say that the irony was that while the owners and the rich labeled me a revolutionary danger when it wasn't true - back at election time - in a very real sense their behavior helped cause me to become what they feared.
They taught me, by their horrible antics, along with the even more important positive example of the activists who stood up to them, the need to replace failed institutions and not just failed policies.
So, yes, they turned me from a reformer into a revolutionary. I abhor violence and chaos, of course. But I am committed to involving the population in taking control of its own destiny.
And with that shift, I and all the people in our administration began to think, okay, what do we need to construct in place of the old offending and offensive institutions - in place of private ownership of workplaces, market competition, distant and alienated government - to make a really humane society?
And that's where we are. Our views are changing and growing. We are still learning, especially from grass roots movements, that we are in a vast project or experiment or campaign or struggle - it doesn't matter what label you use for it - to arrive at a shared vision for our society and to implement it.
Barb: Okay, more specifically, how have your aims changed, as a result of the hostility you faced and lessons from the mass movements, regarding the economy?
Well, right now I am seeking a law forbidding capital export and relocation without community and worker permission to do so, and also a law delineating punishments for employers who impede nationally mandated economic reforms. The idea is to increase worker power, while also making worthy reforms.
For each law, additionally, I want the maximum penalty for owners who violate it to be nationalization of their businesses under the management of currently employed workers.
I am also working explicitly toward reducing inequality, reorienting productive potentials to meet social needs, and enlarging economic democracy in all parts of the economy - workplaces and allocation - all as immediate aims.
For example, to foster equality of wealth and income, I am advocating a sharply progressive property, profit, inheritance, and income tax, with no loopholes, as well as a dramatically-increased minimum wage coupled with a new profit tax that would be specifically coupled to inequities in each firm's pay scale.
Due to the new minimum wage law, minimum pay would rise dramatically. Due to a new pay equity tax, industries with a more equitable pay scale would have more after-tax profits even as income inequities among employees would decline. Heavier property and other wealth-oriented taxes would provide means to pay for other socially valuable programs as well as dramatically diminish differences in wealth. Not only could more equitably structured and democratically run firms use their extra funds to further improve work conditions and increase their social contribution, they could generally out-compete less socially responsible firms.
I now call all these innovations redistributive and I repeatedly explain why redistribution from the rich to the poor is both morally justified and socially essential. Indeed, as you know, I call it "reclamation of stolen or at least misplaced riches."
I have also embarked on a comprehensive full employment policy, including a 25% shorter work week but with no reduction in pay for those earning less than $70,000 a year, a 25% pay reduction for those earning up to $150,000 a year, but a 50% pay reduction for all those earning higher still, and a comprehensive adult education and job training program, and a comprehensive social support system for those unable to work, whatever the reason.
More, beyond seeking these immediate improvements in material equity, I now advocate that workers should have work conditions and responsibilities suitable to their personal development and to their responsibility to contribute to society's well being.
I continually emphasize that attaining equity of life circumstances has to mean not only attaining equity of wealth and pay, but also equity of conditions while at work. Of course this takes time, but there is no reason to put off improving the balance, no reason not to start increasing education, not to start redefining our division of labor.
Indeed, with this principle as a touchstone, I now urge the creation of workers' councils in private and public workplaces throughout the country, as workers choose, but empowered by federal mandate to develop job redefinition programs and to win increasing say over the pace and goal of work.
All these values, I repeatedly say, require new underlying logic and structure - I am very clearly anti capitalist now, and anti market, and urge the definition of new, self managing, cooperative, and equitable approaches to economic life.
Regarding investment priorities, I am now proposing tax incentives for socially useful production and tax disincentives for wasteful and luxury and socially harmful production. This would limit excessive and also ecologically damaging advertising or packaging and other antisocial behavior. It would help foster production to meet real needs and potentials.
Indeed, my administration intends to regulate, punish, and even legislate out of operation any business or industry deemed by an independent citizens bureau followed by a supporting public plebiscite to be destructive of the public good.
Even more, we are building means for federal and state budgets to be overseen by the public that the expenditures affect, not by political or economic elites that mishandle them.
Of course, the biggest single material change in economic priorities that I am undertaking is a 90 percent cut in the defense budget. To make this worthwhile and not a shock for society, I am proposing that existing military bases be converted to centers for ecological clean-up, to centers to build and house new schools and social centers for local communities, to workplaces to produce low income housing or new means of clean transportation or energy production. Federal funding for these bases would persist, while resident GIs, or others seeking new employment, are, if they so desire, retrained to work in as well as to democratically administer the converted bases. These new projects will move a huge percentage of our social capacity from wasteful military violence to socially valuable production and will also be exemplary in every other respect.
Regarding economic democracy and participation, I am overtly and aggressively assisting the formation of consumer and worker organizations to watchdog product quality, to guard against excessive pricing, to advise about product redefinition for durability, ecological sustainability, and value to the user, and to participate in plant and industry decisions with open books and full investigative rights.
And beyond all these first steps, I am also continually clarifying that my ultimate economic goal, and I think what ought to become society's ultimate economic goal too, is the full democratization of economic decision making and the initiation of a national public project to develop new institutions for determining work, consumption, and allocation in a non competitive, cooperative, and self managing way.
In short, I am now intent on explaining that the basic problem with our economy is that capitalist institutions make capitalists prefer war production, persistent unemployment, stunted education and health care, repressive legality, homelessness and impoverishment to having a working class that is secure and informed and therefore able to demand a bigger piece of the pie as well as more control over what kind of pie is baked. I am working to propose and win uncompromising changes that redress existing grievances, create conditions more just and humane, and also establish a new balance of power conducive to winning more fundamental changes in the future.
Barb: What about education, as another example?
I have come to realize due to the incredible hostility of my elite critics and the lessons of education and community activists, that while it is often claimed that schools are failing, it really depends on how you look at them.
Existing schools actually succeed at developing, on the one hand, future executives, professionals, intellectuals, and managers by providing them with an empowering environment, diverse skills development, wide-ranging knowledge, an expectation of fulfillment in life, and, it has to be said, a degree of callousness and paternalism and authoritarianism toward those below.
On the other hand, schools also serve to create future workers by providing them the dregs of literacy and maximum training in enduring boredom and obeying orders. From the point of view of elites, these outcomes aren't sign of failure but of success. Elites like the picture. I find it vile. That's why they went ballistic when I began to even moderately change the situation and that's how I learned the need for much more change.
To my new thinking, we have to understand that to make educational change we need to change the context that schools prepare people to enter so that good education for all makes good sense. We need to realize that this requires an economy promising full employment at jobs that require and utilize people's full capabilities, including their highly developed facility at decision-making, their ample knowledge about society, and their expectations of success and participation.
With those changes underway, we also need to develop a popular movement to seek specific pedagogic changes. To enumerate these pedagogic changes, I am advocating that we have a national debate conducted in schools, with teachers, parents, and students, about curriculum reform, improved teaching methods and teacher-student relations, improved resources for schools, and increased community involvement.
I am already seeking to reduce class size to a maximum of 20 students per teacher in all schools. I am seeking to equalize resources per student across all schools, including architecture, computers, books, and food—and to guarantee education (through college) to anyone who wants it.
I am seeking to provide funds to staff all schools at night for community meetings and remedial and adult education, not just for literacy campaigns, but now also for larger and richer and more diverse adult education as well. And finally, I am advocating and working for education funding to come from new corporate profit taxes to guarantee that regions attain educational parity.
Barb: How about foreign policy?
Well, of course, as everyone knows, I got us out of war in Iraq and have been negotiating a reduction of tensions and an increase in mutual aid in many other places, as well. But on a more broad scale, it is sad but true, as I have come to understand while being bludgeoned by rich people's media and taught by poor people's movements, that U.S. foreign aid has heretofore correlated directly with human rights abuses. The more abuses a country practiced, the higher our aid was. More, this was not due to diplomatic stupidity. The practitioners of our policies were not dumb.
So why did we have such horrible policies? Well, the sad truth is that our policy makers viewed aid as a way to maintain a flow of riches and wealth out of other countries and into ours. Call it empire, if you like. It has been around a long time. Indeed, the U.S., had to overcome the British version at our birth, but then, regrettably, we became purveyors too.
Since this rip-off by our country, or more accurately, by our country's richest and most powerful members, of the assets of other countries requires that the local populations in those other countries submit, of course wherever we give aid, indigenous populations are repressed. That's the quid pro quo. That's largely what the aid buys.
The idea is that in return for our "largesse" in providing the tools of repression and authoritarian rule, and propping up vile leaders beholden to us, those elites get to take home an ample bounty of wealth, and our elites get to take home even more. And if something goes wrong, meaning if the populations of other countries try to get out from under our thumb, well, okay, we call in the Marines. And that isn't a slam at the Marines, it is a slam on our system, and on the people who give the orders.
So I think instead of emphasizing empire our foreign policy needs to respect the integrity of other nations and to reflect, as well, a human-serving domestic economy rather than an incredibly hierarchical one. My overall program internationally, and I certainly admit that my aims change as I learn more, now emphasizes:
· Cessation of all arms shipments abroad. And of course cessation of all our overseas military interventions and actions.
· Cessation of any aid abroad that is likely, by any means, find its way into the hands of police or other potentially repressive agencies in other countries.
· Elimination of all overseas military bases, with half the funds saved from closings returned to the U.S. for solving domestic problems; and half applied to aid to underdeveloped countries in the form of no-strings attached infrastructure improvements, job and skills training, equipment grants, food aid, and privileged buyer status for many goods on the international market.
· Implementation of trade agreements which instead of taking advantage or our greater power and size, apportion the benefits of exchange among ourselves and those we trade with so that the weaker party gets more of the benefits - and the wealth gaps narrow - rather than the stronger party taking more, and the wealth gaps widening. Call it internationalism, if you want, or just plain old morality, either way, it is morally sound despite that it is the antithesis of market exchange.
Barb: We don't have enough time to run through everything, I guess, but what about health and ecology?
Well, in brief, a civilized health program for our society must involve three main components: prevention, universal care for the ill, and cost cutting. So, in light of lessons I have learned from health movements and workers, I am currently working hard on...
· Improved preventive medicine, including increased public education about health-care risks, a massive campaign around diet, increased cleanliness in hospitals, and large-scale provision of community centers for exercise and public health education.
· Universal health care for the ill, including the government providing comprehensive coverage for all citizens.
· Reassessment of training programs for doctors and nurses to expand the number of qualified health workers and to better utilize the talents of those already trained.
· Civilian review over drug company policies with a stringent cap on profits and remuneration for officials, with violations punished by nationalization - and review of the medical impact of all institutions in society—for example, the health effects of work conditions and product choices, with an eye toward improvements.
I am also seeking sharp limits on the incomes of health professionals and on the profits that pharmaceutical and other medical companies could earn, and of course this is in accord with our new ideas about incomes generally.
To get rich, I have come to realize, is vile. It means one is taking way more than what one's effort and sacrifice in contributing to the economy warrant - but to get rich off illness, that is especially pernicious. And insofar as we need large scale funding for our health programs, it will come from punitive taxes on unhealthful products such as cigarettes, alcohol, and unsafe automobiles, etc.
As to the ecology, as you know I am establishing a department of ecological stewardship to develop a list of necessary clean-up steps, as well as a policy to preserve the ecology and prevent further global warming.
Beyond this, I argue that funds for clean energy development and deployment, for all kinds of conservation, etc., should come from a tax on current polluters and on prior beneficiaries of unclean industrial operations.
It used to be that for a company if it could produce more cheaply by polluting and not cleaning up the mess and it was not just wise but even essential to do so. Others would pay the costs imposed by the pollution, and you would save. If you didn't do it, and your competitors in the market place did do it, they would outcompete you with their savings. This is the connection, or one of the connections, between market exchange, profit seeking, and ecological degradation. And so one of our big tasks is to make all these connections clear and to develop insight and activism focused not just on single issues, but on the whole overarching logic of society.
The critical innovation in our approach to ecological sanity is therefore to open a national public debate about the relation between our basic economic and social institutions and the environment. We want to involve the population in clarifying that we need institutions attuned to ecological costs and benefits and that we must experiment with non-market approaches to allocation, rather than trying to police the inevitable ecological disasters that markets routinely produce.
Bard: Okay, what about Race and Gender?
Well, part of it is obvious and basically what I felt on being elected and what I began doing then. But even beyond ensuring that there aren't vile characterizations and media manipulations, and beyond ensuring that there is proportional representation at all levels of society for the various groups, and beyond redressing, as well, the material and situational residues of past injustices, I have come to realize there is more we have to do.
So to accomplish the above, we have education programs, caucuses giving minorities and women oversight and a room of their own, affirmative action and taxes and reparations and even the new Women's Bank and Minority Bank to undo past accumulated imbalances, and facilitate new projects, etc.
But I am also eager to initiate, which is why we have the new cabinet positions for gender and sexuality and for race and culture, widespread and deep going discussions aimed at finding the structural relationships inside families and in schooling and in sexual interactivity, and in cultural communities and especially in their interrelations, which tend to produce the distorting and unjust views and practices that we call sexism and racism. I want not only to have programs to redress the symptoms, but also to get at the deepest causes.
In that, my aim for racism and sexism is a bit like it is for the economy. We don't just say let's get wealth gaps narrowed, we also say, let's remove the institutional relations that produce the gaps in the first place, and I think we need to do the same for race and gender, and for politics, too, for that matter - which is why we are embarking on building neighborhood, county, and region based assemblies for direct democratic control over society - and why we intend that in time these will be the seat of political power, not mayor's offices, governor's offices, or even my office, for that matter.
Barb: Okay, I know we should go on with this a lot longer, but even our extended time slot is almost up, so to summarize how would you say your overall current program contrasts, broadly, to two years ago?
When I took office, I thought I was going to easily implement modest programs to better the situation of society's less well off sectors and to improve our health, education, etc.
As you know and as we discussed, I ran into a minefield - really a shit storm - if you will pardon my language - of quite vicious elite opposition.
This was a real eye opener for me, but instead of succumbing, I decided to fulfill my promises.
Of course the situation got more embattled, but it taught me that making society better is not a matter of tweaking this or that lever. It is about completely changing the levers.
So, again, when I took office my program was about alleviating pain, improving institutional efficiency, and generally making the system work better. But now though my program still seeks innovations to better the lot of those worst off and to improve education, health, etc., it is also about enfranchising workers and consumers and empowering all citizens regarding all the decisions that affect them.
So now it is not about making the existing system work better but is instead about discovering what new structures and relations we need to put in place to remove the obstacles that impede the fullest liberation of our talents and the most complete fulfillment of our needs.
We can't have a social system that produces the behavior I encountered for trying to meet my rather moderate election promises. We can't have a system that makes people so anti social and so greedy, so ignorant and so violent, and that then gives precisely those people most control. We can't have a system that robs so many people of their human possibilities.
So now my program is about real change, just like I said in the campaign, but thanks to the opposition I encountered and what it taught me, and thanks even more to the huge numbers of people who allied with my efforts and fought and keep fighting against all obstacles, it is about change that goes way beyond what I was talking about in the election - change in basic relations, in property, in decision making, in the norms governing who gets how much product, how we legislate, how we adjudicate, how we raise the next generation, and so on.
Barb: What about your approach to winning these changes, how is it different now, than before?
Before I thought winning change was about convincing politicians and prominent citizens of the wisdom of my programs. Now I know that it is about amassing popular power, not just votes but sustained activism, sufficient to force our outcomes on the rich and powerful, who are fighting viciously against them.
Before I thought I was the key to it all, honestly with everyone calling me Mr. President, and all. Now I know that while I am important to the process, the real key is public awareness, public insight, public energy, public militancy, public organization, and public action. It isn't me who is taking over and running organizations throughout society in new ways - it is the public.
You know how politicians used to talk about a war on drugs, a war on terrorism. Well, I don't like addictions and I sure as hell don't like terrorism - including inflicted by the US on others - but I also don't like rich, comfortable, powerful people who want to keep a tight grip on most of society's wealth and power. Those people need to lose if real freedom and real justice are to blossom. If it is a war that those people want, a war that they thought they could intimidate me with - fine, we will proceed, and it will be a war of justice against greed, of equity against inequality, of solidarity against antisociality, of self management against autocracy. If they know no other language than battle, then even though we want communication and reason, we can battle too, and we will.
Barb: To finish, do you still believe we can have a just, equitable, really participatory society? What is your long run goal?
Yes, I believe it more than ever. In fact, for the first time, I am really coming to understand what such words mean.
I have learned we can't have a really participatory society, though, if we maintain a few people owning all workplaces and other economic assets. We can't have it if we maintain elitist decision-making and cultural exclusion or sexism. We can't have capitalism, I now realize, or patriarchy, or racism, and equity or solidarity. We can't have capitalism and have democracy much less real participation and self-management. The rich and powerful, trying to intimidate me, instead taught me the need for fundamental change by the way that they rejected even small incursions on their wealth and power.
And I also know that we can't have participation, real democracy, with government structures that have no roots in the population, but that exist over and above the population. These things I now know, but they don't cause me to think that a better life, a better world, is impossible. On the contrary, they illuminate the path to that better life and better world.
Are the obstacles to real change larger than I thought they were, larger than I understood them to be? Yes, they are.
But I have also seen poor people, working people, women and men of all races, come to political life, come to activist life, all over our country, these past two years, and as large and intense as the forces of reaction and hostility have been, I have seen that the popular forces that can become aroused and involved for peace and justice are far larger - and we are arousing them and they are getting active. And so we will win.
We have seen such an incredible outpouring of humanity and caring, of sharing and organizing, of innovation and creativity, of learning and doing, and especially of mutual aid in just these two years - just think what we can all together accomplish with more time and with the accelerated momentum that comes with a steady accrual of gains that both improve people's lives and, with each step, give us more means to go still further.
So yes, I think we can have an economy in which workers and consumers cooperatively self manage economic life without familiar hierarchies of wealth, power, and circumstance, and indeed without class divisions of any kind.
And yes, I think we can continue the long journey of overcoming racial and gender beliefs, structures, and even residual imbalances and hierarchies - both ideological and material - in a society that has ways of living in families, and of birthing and nurturing the next generation, and of celebrating identity, and that has mutual beliefs, and shared language, cuisine, and all the other components of culture - thereby arriving finally at a society that does not mistreat anyone, explicitly or implicitly, for race or gender, or sexuality.
And yes, I think we can have a political system that accomplishes adjudication of disputes, legislation of shared norms, and implementation of collective projects with every citizen having a self managing participatory say in the outcomes, without elitism, without alienation, without injustice.
Yes, I do believe all that.
I am not the same man who ran for office against John McCain two years ago and won. I said then I was not a perfect person and would not be a perfect President. That was true, truer than I knew, even. But I am someone who can learn, and I will not bow to greed and viciousness.
Many deep interpersonal values are the same for me now, as two years ago, yes, but the view of the world that I have, the view of what we need to do, both short term and long term, and the view of the steps required and the tasks we have to undertake that I now have, those have all altered greatly.
I have learned much. What before seemed to me largely irrelevant, now seems to me the core of our future - explicit desires to transform society's central institutions, explicit desires for revolution in ideas but also in social relations. And what before seemed to me essential, which was convincing elites by reasoned appeal, done largely behind closed doors over the heads of the public, now seems to me both a fruitless pursuit and a horribly repulsive one. The task I see and feel is to address, learn from, and accompany the broad public and its popular movements into a new society that we will all enjoy together.
Barb: Thank you, Mr. President.
Barack: You are very welcome Barb, but mostly the thanks go from me to the public, for waking me up and for making possible the incredible social project we now undertake. And please, it is Barack...
From: Z Net - The Spirit Of Resistance Lives
URL: http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/19345
posted by attilav at 13:14
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