Random acts of writing: Craig Carter
Sunday, November 9, 2008 12:30 AM PST
Last summer, I promised myself I’d sit down and write a column before I went to bed on Election Night. This is that column.
It never ceases to amaze me. America changes government, and not one shot is fired, no one dies, no one goes to jail for being unfortunate enough to hold the losing political viewpoint. A peaceful, seamless transition that sees the loser graciously conceding, the sitting lame duck president calling the president-elect to offer any and all help needed in transition and throngs of young people, yell, “look what we did,” in unison.
While I didn’t come right out and support either candidate, I think you had a fairly good idea who I supported. But I didn’t support our president-elect because of that spooky messianic obsession a lot of liberals have with him. I supported him because his campaign was beyond impressive.
It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if, way back in 2006, the Obama campaign staff sat down and looked at every presidential campaign since 1968 and decided to learn every lesson they could from each and every campaign. And then they spent the next two years putting those learned lessons into practice.
It’s long been my belief that good political candidates make good leaders and vice versa. For instance, Ronald Reagan was a heck of a campaigner, who found ways to inspire a nation as a leader. On the other side of the for instance, I direct your attention to Richard Nixon, who was a man of big ideas and even bigger paranoia, whose campaign style can only be described as painful and whose leadership style can only be described as disastrous.
That aside, I just hope President-elect Obama is serious about his pledge to try to unite America. I don’t know about you, but I’ve grown awfully tired of the red state/blue state, real America/fake America separations and the nimrods that go out of their way to foster that idiocy.
I suppose that hope comes part and parcel from my years living as a hippie-freak, free-love liberal amongst all you gun-toting, Reagan-loving conservatives. As much difference as I see around me, I always manage to find we have a lot more in common than we do to fight about. And I think the next few years are going to find us in situations where Americans are going to need to pull together, instead of being two separate teams of horses pulling on opposite ends of the wagon.
I don’t think the wagon can take much more of that kind of stress.
At any rate, I’m sure there are those of you reading this who are certain the world is going to fall apart, the country is going to go into the dumper and the sky will never be blue again. Let me assure you there were a whole lot of Democrats that feared the exact same thing when George W. Bush took office eight years ago. A lot happened in those eight years. The blame for some of which can be placed directly at his feet, and a lot of which was completely beyond his control.
But the nation survived because that’s what America does politically.
And, in the end, there isn’t that much difference between this year’s bitter presidential election and those heated Federalist/Whig to-dos that marked the early days of the republic.
The major similarity being, after the debate was over, we all remained Americans. And that’s a pretty important thing to remember.
And despite my hopes otherwise, I think it won’t be long before talk radio and Fox News will have their claws bared, ’cuz sure as I’m sittin’ here on this Election Night, the honeymoon is going to be short.
And soon the pundits will be making conjecture as to how Sarah Palin, or some completely unknown entity on the GOP horizon, will fare against the incumbent President Obama in 2012.
But still, the majesty of Election Day never ceases to amaze me.
