Campaign 2008

Campaign 2008 ended yesterday!

It's the morning after Election Day. I'm sure the blogosphere is thundering with the sound of frantic keyboard-tapping. Naturally I plan to add a few electrons to the storm.

The swooning extremes of Obama supporters would have us believe that once he takes office, he'll raise Muhammad from the dead and ask him to help smooth things over with Islamic nations. The very power of the Messiobamic Words will light and heat our homes and run our factories, with no need for coal, oil, nuclear, water, solar or wind sources. His mighty intellect will become the motivating force that will move mountains - not to mention cars, trains, boats and airplanes, eliminating the need for fossil fuels. His unprecedented coolness will put an end to global warming. The gold-encrusted gems of his boundless wisdom will become riches in all of our pockets, and fall like a rain of endless wealth upon the land.

Meanwhile, at the other rabid extreme, the Obama opposition will wail and tear their garments. Casting ashes upon their heads they will mourn the rise to power of the Antichrist. He will make bargains with Satan, and even with terrorists. He will gather all the nation's money by taxation and then spend it on studying how it should best be spent. He will outlaw guns, knives, camping equipment, white people and apple pie. Basketball will replace baseball as the "American pastime." We will descend into a pit of socialistic hell from which there will be no hope of redemption. They will continue to assert that everything was fine in America until "them Democrats took over Congress" and ran the economy into the ground. Serious students of conspiracy theory (OK, serious inventors of conspiracy theory!) will go so far as to hint that the Democrats deliberately sabotaged the economy so they could blame it on George W. Bush and give Obama a boost.

There will be (as there have already been) accusations that black voters chose Obama solely because of his race. Of course, had McCain won, the charges from the other side would have been that white voters refused to vote for a black man. I'm still waiting to hear someone assert that Irish Americans refused to vote for "that Scotsman, McCain," choosing instead "that good Irishman, O'Bama."

The fear of rampant socialism is many, many years too late. The "dirty little secret" (as Ed Chinn has called it) of American politics is that the bulk of the population votes for the candidate and/or Party they believe will hand them the most money. Thus, our great Republic is in many ways nothing more than a mechanism engineered to periodically allow either the wealthy socialists or the poor socialists to gain power.

I think the aftermath of this election will follow a path similar to every other election I can remember. The winners will find that things don't turn out as well as they had hoped, and the losers will discover that things turn out not as badly as they feared. In truth, Democrats will probably be overjoyed if Obama does nothing more than pull off the same trick that Bill Clinton achieved (the first Democratic President since FDR to do so), and win a second term.

I hope that Obama will be able to overcome the inevitable stumbles in his administration. The skeletons that come dancing out of his closet when the Republican pipers play. The bad decision that results in a negative outcome. The "contradiction" in which he gets caught. The realization by his voters that he has more than once promised mutually-exclusive courses of action to sub-groups in his Party, in order to garner votes. The outrageous statement made by an associate, maybe even the one he's married to.

In a way I'm happy that McCain lost the election. I think that at heart he is a brave man and a man of integrity. I would hate to see him reduced to repaying the influence that won him the election, instead of leading this country. I'm afraid that no matter how much a President may wish to shop at a farmer's market, he ends up owing his soul to the company store. I'm also glad that I don't have to spend the next four years with Sarah Palin one heartbeat away from the Oval Office. Disclaimer - I'm not suggesting that Barack Obama is any less of a man of truth and valor than John McCain (I don't know), nor do I want to see him forced into the same inevitable trap.

My candidate, the proponent of literal near-anarchy, did not win. I did not think he would. In fact, I'm not sure anyone will know how he fared, as I am not sure that anyone reports write-in votes. I simply voted my belief in the words spoken by Gerald Ford in 1974, and often (apparently without grounds) attributed to Thomas Jefferson - "A government big enough to give you everything you want, is strong enough to take everything you have."

But I have saved the worst political news for last. In my opinion, this is the most depressing reality of all:

Campaign 2012 begins today!