Dan Markham

I’m thankful for the avoidance of what could have been …

… the passing of what we have all been forced to suffer through (gettim Gobbly!) …

… and the hope of what can be.

Have a hopeful holiday.

One of the things about the experience of covering election night from inside the bubble of a TV studio is that one becomes slightly paranoid that the entire event has been staged for the cameras: a cruel Truman Show kind of experiment, the illusion to be broken only once one leaves the premises and is interrupted by a passerby saying, “No, silly, Obama didn’t carry Ohio! And they’re having a recount again in Florida!”

– Nate Silver

Of course, I, myself, did not spend election night inside “the bubble of a TV studio”. Of course, it wasn’t staged. Of course both are, in fact, true: that Obama, indeed carried Ohio (hell, yes!) and that Florida, even though it was one of the last Eastern states to call, once called, presented no signs of doubt that Obama was the true recipient of it’s electoral votes. Mr. Silver has nothing to worry about.

Of course.

But I must still be in a period of adjustment. It still seems unreal. The light looks the same. Everybody is still on their way to work in the morning, on their way back home at night. Papers still need to be written. Dinner still needs to be made. But, people are talking. There is excitement and pride wafting in the air that the United States can stand for something more than arrogance, hubris and stupidity. I still see Obama pins out there. They still say HOPE.

I’m going to have to go easy on myself. Eight years is a long time and certain mental adjustments were made. It’s going to take some time, I think, to be OK with feeling positive about my government and to be comfortable having hope for the future. But I do have hope. I am proud — exceedingly so — of our country. I guess I just never thought this day would come.

Update: A serendipitous discovery …

Yes, folks, it, indeed, appears that the gloves are coming off in the waning hours of the 2008 race for President of the United States. These final weeks are a test of character, sort of a national Milgram experiment where we see, when given the chance and the implicit permission to do whatever needs to be done, the real ugliness comes out for all to see. All of the base and mean thoughts held at bay, in the hopes that one will be victorious at this point and therefore able to hold the victor’s pose and have no need of making a tool of one’s hatred, are let loose on the public in the hopes that those base and mean thoughts will touch on people’s fears and prejudices and so turn around one’s flagging campaign for the highest office in the land.

And so it goes in Virginia, where McCain’s campaign chair in Buchanan County, Bobby May, shows us what he, and, by extension, John McCain, are really made of. This exploitive, bigoted, ignorant and hate-filled piece, published in a local paper in Buchanan County, Virgina should have never seen the light of day but now that it has, it is easy to see why McCain represents a past we should all be happy to leave behind.

Update: Bobby May has been relieved of his post inside the McCain campaign.

Two take-away quotes from an article in The New Yorker entitled “The Choice”. The negative:

The longer the campaign goes on, the more the issues of personality and character have reflected badly on McCain. Unless appearances are very deceiving, he is impulsive, impatient, self-dramatizing, erratic, and a compulsive risk-taker. These qualities may have contributed to his usefulness as a “maverick” senator. But in a President they would be a menace.

The positive:

At a moment of economic calamity, international perplexity, political failure, and battered morale, America needs both uplift and realism, both change and steadiness. It needs a leader temperamentally, intellectually, and emotionally attuned to the complexities of our troubled globe. That leader’s name is Barack Obama.

Regardless of how you are leaning, weather you still need to make up your mind or, as in my case, simply like some buttressing, some reinforcement to your already strongly held opinion as to who would make the better president, regardless of these things, an edifying read.