Thoughts…

I promised not to write about the election, because this makes me angry. I think about the election a lot now and am often angry and not writing. Some random thoughts:

• Obama has to know he won’t be able to pass his Health plan. Without mandating coverage, which he says he will not do, the insurance companies will never agree to the kind of reduced premiums he is talking about. And even if he could walk that tightrope there is no way he could do it and battle the trillion dollar drug industry.

• Americans have grown amazingly intolerant of fear. Obama has insulated himself perfectly – the rhetorical genius of “hope,” the absolute antonym of fear, is a political masterpiece. American’s may not realize that when the McCain campaign uses “Obama” and “terrorist” in the same sentence they are using fear tactics, but over the Bush years Americans have absorbed fear, grown a distaste for it, and tire of it. This tactic is simply not working for McCain in the ways it has operated in the past.

• Obama’s race is (and this joyfully amazes me) actually a plus. I watched a discussion on PBS last night with three black leaders and none would say that race was a negative factor for his campaign. Glorious Day! Sure, there are probably quite a number of people out there that won’t vote for Obama because he is black, but how many of those people would ever vote for a democrat anyway? What race has done is separate the bigots from the ideologically conservative constituency in the Republican Party. No longer hidden under the guise of racial code words and religious pandering, Obama’s race has brought out all those still living under rocks. Look on You Tube for videos of McCain rally lines and you will find grave examples of racial bigotry and ignorance… pure lunacy. Even if only small minorities of ideological conservatives are turned off by this it is a huge blow to McCain – partly because his natural constituency is dwindling anyway, and partly because the ideological conservatives are the ones who actually give money to the campaign.

• Sarah Palin

• Obama won’t be able to raise the capital gains tax as promised. I suspect he won’t raise it at all until this economic crisis is history, at least two years. When he does he won’t be able to raise it to Regan/Clinton levels (28%) as stated. The realistic hope now is 25% and Obama could go as low as 20%. This is a shame, but looks sound compared with the Republicans proposal of a two-year suspension of the capital gains tax. This simply doesn’t make sense – it would encourage people to sell off their positive assets, the stocks they have made money on and have weathered the credit storm, and would leave the market more depressed. And it doesn’t address the problem of this bad equity because you don’t pay capital gains tax on loses.

• The fall of John McCain fills me with a great sadness. I can no longer stand the attacks of fellow liberals on John McCain. I have heard about him exaggerating his war story, being motivated by daddy issues, and various other abstract attacks on his character. Sure, his economical policy has been absolutely disproven, he has run a horrendous campaign and in the process succumb to advisors who have convinced him he needs to completely tarnish his image to win. But although John McCain will always be a flawed man, he will always be a great man.
A story:

Years ago, a man named Donald Rumsfeld got a vision. The vision was of an elite and mobile fighting force. He argued that the military couldn’t run itself, that the military had to outsource its functions to private companies in order to be most efficient and swift. He was eager to see his model in action and the invasion of Iraq provided him with the chance. He would ignore the counseling of many in the Pentagon to see his vision through. Sure enough his elite force was swift and thorough, penetrating Bagdad in mere days. Drinking champagne Rumsfeld was drunk on his own success. But Rumsfeld was sadly mistaken; this wasn’t capture the flag, but modern warfare, where war becomes a part of life and not a swift action. In his stupor he made terrible drunken blunders – never lifting a finger or offering any law enforcement services at all as anarchy broke out on the streets and liberated Iraqis went looting; failing to use the Iraqi army and, in sheer stupidity, completely dissolving and rejecting them, leaving a mass of heavily armed young men without jobs..
While the democrats were crying into mirrors and figuring out how to save their political careers John McCain was calling for the head of Donald Rumsfeld on every news show that would have him. He was the most prominent critic of how the war was conducted and a college student smoking grass out of a purple bong somewhere in Iowa shouted, “fuck yeah, McCain!”

McCain must be frustrated. McCain had been telling the Bush administration that the way they were running the war was wrong. Had McCain run it, there is no doubt that the war would have resulted in fewer civilian and US casualties. That’s a big deal to someone who is a former service member. With the surge successful, and McCain vindicated, there should be no doubt that McCain is a substantially better wartime commander than Bush. The idea of the Iraq war as a mistake is prominent in people’s minds now, but perhaps it shouldn’t be. A lot of democrats voted for the war and at the time it was inevitable. John McCain risked his political life fighting the Rumsfeld military command – that’s the difference between the ideal and the real.

• Obama is going to be a Great President. His face be on money. We will take our grandchildren to his monument. Americans love a first of anything and although no one is talking about it now, the fact that Obama could be the first African-American President will be in history books for centuries. The world of a modern citizen is drastically different that the world of someone living 200, 100, even 50 years ago. Our world is more about image than landownership, more urban than rural, and more interconnected. Public sentiment is no longer an indication of times, it is the definer of times. If Obama can patiently talk the nation into believing its possibility and align people with a progressive future the deep recesses of the Bush years will only serve as just contrast to the America of Obama.