I Am So Tired
Upsides:
*Four of my best friends are heading to Washington, D.C. this weekend.
*At least one very dear friend will now move to Washington, D.C., and chances are that several more will wind up here in some capacity. Also, I’ll be really well-sourced in the White House.
*Better than half of America is having a wonderful day. Last night, the streets were simply bananas. I went to bed around 5:45 AM.
*Mark Kirk!
Downsides:
*The Republican party will really struggle to win back the trust of American voters, and we’re about to go through a harebrained, .
*I have to function today. My batteries are really, really run down.
You got cut off at “harebrained, .” I’m guessing you’re going to say circular firing squad or some such. That said, don’t blame you if you were up til 5:45. Thanks for the gracious post.
— Greg Sanders · Nov 5, 05:14 PM · #
Don’t despair. It swings back. And the GOP has a window. You have a window. It’s the window of technocracy. The Republicans can win, and win soon, if they can restore the American people’s faith that they are a party of policy wonks who can get things done. But your candidates actually have to have the juice.
— Freddie · Nov 5, 05:29 PM · #
Not a time for despair!
A time to be opportunistic and exploitive…..even subversive.
Get some rest.
You are going to need it.
— matoko_chan · Nov 5, 06:50 PM · #
It’s funny, Reihan, things turned out much as I wanted when voting, and reading the crowing from left-leaning pundits today I am actually sort of down.
In the past few years we’ve learned some awful things about ourselves. We are a nation of people who doesn’t much care about torturing our prisoners or denying them fundamental rights, even when they appear to’ve committed no crime, and to the extent we do care, we seem on balance to be stoked about it. We don’t seem to much value our privacy, or the integrity of our government, or the structures carefully erected to keep it in our control. We borrowed ridiculous amounts of money so everyone could get a flatscreen plasma TV, to the point where the whole world “financial system” became a contstant flow of money from the third world to the US treasury to enable Americans to spend, spend, spend. Great. And now people are talking like suddenly all of America thinks like it’s liberal elite and is ready to move into Harvard Square with us. And it just ain’t so.
Meanwhile, Barack Obama, a good man, is elected, and looking at 2012, thinking, yes we can, and smart enough to know that the electorate — his electorate, too — has got yahoos in spades. And he’s worsening the mix with a certain economic xenophobia. OK, we’ve got a new President. It’s a small step. But it’s close to insignificant in light of what we have to do. I saw all the folks at the rally last night with signs saying, yes we did, and thought, hell no, you haven’t even started. So I’m not really enthused about all the self-congratulation.
— Sanjay · Nov 5, 07:46 PM · #
Austin is still Austin, and Hutto squeaked through.
Hutto Total Vote %
McCain 1,495 57.02%
Obama 1,051 40.08%
Senate
Cornyn 1,562 60.83%
Noriega 917 35.71%
GRAND NEW PARTY comes in case lots, right?
— Hutto Haole · Nov 5, 08:18 PM · #
Sanjay, baby steps.
In one way, we have come a long, long way from the EEA where i might have killed and eaten you because your skin was the wrong color or you had the wrong tatts.
We have just elected a man named Barak Hussein Obama to the high office, and the brightest star in the sparse firmament of republican intelligentsia is named Reihan Salam.
How can you not be hopeful?
— matoko_chan · Nov 5, 08:41 PM · #
I’m sorry, Sanjay, but I’ve just endure 8 years of an administration that called people who thought like me divisive, seditious, naive and crazy. I’ve just gone through a 20 month presidential campaign where me, my family and most of the people I love were rendered “not real Americans.” There’s gonna be just a little crowing. Not too much; the pendulum will swing back, and I like too many conservatives to gloat loudly. But it does feel good. It does.
This is going to be largely dependent on individual perspective, of course, but it seems to me that liberals today are treating conservatives better than we were treated in 2004. There was a lot of eliminationist rhetoric, a lot of “let’s curb stomp them once and for all”. I think we’re doing a bit of a better job, on that.
— Freddie · Nov 5, 10:43 PM · #
Those people on the streets were not crowing, they were celebrating. It’s VB day. The emotions are relief and thankfulness.
— cw · Nov 6, 05:02 AM · #
Except Freddie, that you’re exactly wrong in the way I’m disappointed about. This just wasn’t a victory for the clever liberal.
Barack Obama’s electorate took the right to marry away from my friends (and invalidated some of their marriages to boot). His electoral win came on the backs of a few pretty solid racists, too, who just happened to be sick of their economic situation, and that was documented. Hell, I can point at dozens of Obama voters around me who think Berkeley is fundamentally antiAmerican and New England is straight-up commie: and they love the guy. He came here four times and told them how he supported the death penalty and their gun rights (which are pretty heavily exercised hereabouts) and he rattled sabres, a bit recklessly, on Pakistan. Obama won lots and lots of 2004 Bush voters. And I’m pretty sure that if you sound out the American people on, say, prisoner abuse and habeas rights, you’ll find that their consensus hasn’t changed much since 2004. For that matter I don’t really think that the American people — including the Obama coalition — is anywhere near so concerned about the President’s apparent belief that he can blow off Congress or the courts whenever he wants to, so long as the President, y’know, “gets things done.”
I don’t think that the country’s moved so much, really, and it’s going to be sorely tempting for Obama to “triangulate” like mad. I for sure think that a good long speech on detainee abuse — and one has been sorely needed — would hurt him. And frankly Obama has been happy to play the jingo card himself: remember that this is the campaign that opened with a racist attack on Indian-Americans for which Obama offered a mealy-mouthed psuedo-apology to the effect that he knew what they were trying to say, but they said it wrong (really, Senator? And what were they trying to say?), went on to exclude young Muslim supporters in headscarves from their photos, and pandered to cheap xenophobia on trade. I’m not kidding myself that us guys who like an afternoon cappucino have won much yet. Just possibly GWB is the President we deserve, and for sure you haven’t been granted entree into the “real” America.
And as for this, the people I love are being called “not real Americans,” junk, God, Freddie, why must you always be such a complete pussy? I for one could give a crap what Sarah Palin or Rush Limbaugh calls me and my peeps. In fact, let’s be straight up here: I am in fact, not a “patriot.” The label troubles me. And I’m honestly not real real sure I, and hip Cambridge/Berkeley urban elites like me, are “real” salt-of-the-Earth Americans. I’ve been on my Margaret-Mead-esque tours of “real” America, and those people are pretty different. They get misty at the “Star-Spangled Banner,” and every time I hear it I still think, God, what an ugly song. They invest a lot more of their time in PTA and Girl Scouts and local things and less in Amnesty International and WWF and I guess they look internally to the country in a way I don’t. They have a lot more at stake than I do too, since I am pretty sure that everything in the country can go to hell and I’ll still be able to live OK, ‘cause I’m so damn educated. Frankly I generally feel more at home with, and more comfortable with, like urban elites from other countries than I do with a lot of rural or small-town America. Those people creep my ass out, at the same time as I kind of feel like they are in some way profoundly important to the things I do in fact value about where I live. I’m pretty sure I don’t put “country first,” whatever Obama says. I am for sure a bit subversive (and have the rap to prove it), a lot naive, and divisive as hell. So if Palin wants to tell people I’m not a “real” American, she can go ahead, I often wonder if maybe she’s right in some sense anyways, and I’m about a hundred times more concerned with sticks and stones — of which there are plenty — than with names.
— Sanjay · Nov 6, 05:14 PM · #
Sanjay…..
You have gifts and skillz.
But don’t you have have an obligation to help others?
That is what draws me to both Reihan and Obama.
They want to help, they care.
You can scorn the 40percenters, but the truth is they NEED religion….they are never going to get Teh Science.
Is there a way to help them, other than the traditional GOP way of scamming their votes with identity politics and fear?
I think Obama messaged that, and that is why the GOP lost.
— matoko_chan · Nov 6, 06:18 PM · #
Makoto, try not to be suck a condescending dickwad. I have mad science skills — and I’m what most people would call pretty religious, attending services probably about tiwce a week, doing daily meditation and prayer. And I think I’m doing as much as I can to “help others,” and probably more than most, what about you? Frankly I call bullshit on the idea that Obama thinks it’s more important to “help others” than GWB, I just think Bush sucks at it. I’m just not confused that somehow the opinion of the electorate has changed because Obama better catered to it, much as I like the guy.
— Sanjay · Nov 6, 06:48 PM · #
Hey Sanjay, cut out the personal abuse or we’ll have to ban you.
— Alan Jacobs · Nov 6, 06:58 PM · #
I’m a practicing Sufi.
Sorry for being a dickwad.
:(
— matoko_chan · Nov 6, 08:26 PM · #
Sanjay if you can’t lay off the name calling and personal stuff, I just can’t talk to you. I’m sorry.
— Freddie · Nov 7, 04:57 AM · #