This past month, I finally saw Tim Burton’s Nightmare Before Christmas, and as I watch the reaction to Barack Obama’s election, the song from that movie “Making Christmas” reverberated in my mind. The characters in the film are trying to overwrite what it meant to have Christmas in favor of their new matrix, which is precisely what the pundits wish to accomplish in making mountains out of molehills in their haste to attach themselves to a “historic” precedence with the first black president. I have nothing against them. In fact, I wanted Colin Powell to run. Thank God he didn’t since apparently he’s more of an opportunist than a statesman. So many people want to make a hullabaloo about what a great thing Obama’s election is and how historic it is. If they mean by historic that it’s been done before, they are right. If they mean it means something new and something good, they are way off base.
My friends who studied history can recite quotations galore about how history repeats itself. If you ignore his age and his complexion, Obama represents things that have been tried before that failed. Obama is a socialist, a communist, and a Marxist. His election, while in truth a historic event, represents a rewind of history to failed policies of the past, which is ironically exactly what he campaigned against. He represents nothing new. He can’t even…erm…come up with…um…an articulate…eh…phrase without…um…a telegraph, er teleprompter. Being the first person of his race to be elected doesn’t make it a good thing. I didn’t want Hillary Clinton to be the first woman president, regardless of her race. I opposed Clinton and Obama on their policy, irrespective of gender, race, creed, etc. We cannot get caught up in the historical nature of this and allow it to overcome our common sense. His ideas are what matters most, and his ideas, though historic, aren’t necessarily good. Many other things were historic: the Holocaust, the invasion of the Mongols, the crusades, the bombing of Hiroshima, the Inquisition, the Boston Massacre, the assassination of Lincoln, but I dare you to prove to me how those were good.
Obfuscating the banality of the facts with sweeping emotions, people got caught up in the moment, based on identity rather than on substance. So, in essence, Obama’s election constitutes a reflection for the microcosm found in High School student council and prom elections- popularity and identity over value. If you look back at my yearbook to those voted most popular or to prom court and look at what they did with their lives in the past 10 years, you’ll find their curriculum vitae resoundingly disappointing. While they make a big deal about massive turnout to vote in this election, they ignore the fact of the matter that in general turnout was no bigger than 2004, and black vote was up from 12% to 13% of registered voters. What few blacks I saw vote on election day came at the last minute. That’s inconsistent with excitement in my estimation.
Obama basically bought the election. He outspent his opponent, who never managed to drum up enough support among his base to get them to show up and donate money. Even still, despite all the money spent and all the excitement over Obama and all the first time voters, Obama didn’t bring people out in droves to vote, nor did any other candidate for that matter. I live in and worked at the polls for politically active precincts. How else do you account for the fact that 1200 out of 1860 voters had already voted before election day?
McCain handed Obama everything else he needed. McCain was weak, so Obama skirted virtually without opposition to the win. Despite posts designed to describe how McCain could win, he never followed any of my advice. My father commented last week how glad he was that he never served under Captain McCain, since McCain demonstrates a fundamental lack of understanding regarding how to win a military contest. If you want to win, you attack, and then you never let up. In Jennifer Lopez’s role in Enough, her trainer asks, “What do you do after you attack?” to which she answers, “Nothing…because I never stop attacking.” By contrast, McCain would attack, and then take it back. They criticized him for not reigning in Sarah Palin, who went on the offensive whenever possible and charged up the base for the first and really only enduring time during McCain’s entire botched and half-hearted effort. Without Palin, it would have been a landslide for Obama. Such slipshod effort makes me wonder if McCain was in collusion to get Obama elected. Huckabee cut a deal to cut out Romney, then McCain ran a slipshop, half-hearted effort such that I was never sure he ever wanted to win.
Oh yes, this election was historic. We elected a big-government socialist opposed by an appeasement centrist “nice guy”, just like McGovern v. Carter in 1976. Will it pave way to another Reagan Revolution and the accompanying return to liberty? God save us if it doesn’t.
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