The Aftermath

Now that the endorphins from last night has somewhat worn off, I had a couple of thoughts about the election that has completely consumed the news and minds of the entire country. It has been an exhilarating, interesting and ridiculous two years of campaigning, and I for one, am both happy with the end result and that it is now over - for now.

The first and foremost thing that I am the happiest with is the sheer heroic nature of this election on numerous levels. America, a country long seen by the world in the light of its history with African/Colored Americans. This, in my mind, is the complete realization of the entire Civil Rights movement, and I was astounded at the landslide in the electoral college last night when President-Elect Obama took the election at a huge margin. This to me speaks to the distance that the American people has come, and while it is not a complete journey yet, it is something to be vastly proud of.

That being said, I was extremely disturbed by the comments of a number of people throughout the election. The past eight years seems to have reinforced a sheer willful ignorance on the part of the American people, and this was no exception. The shouts of Senator McCain supporters during his rallies and my fellow Norwich Students, of Kill Him! Hang Him! was very troubling and it shows that there are still deep divisions within the country. To his credit, Sen. McCain did his part to silence this, but nowhere nearly as effective as Pres-Elect Obama did during his rallies at cries directed at Sen. McCain during his campaign.

This was a huge element that I didn't like - it drudged up a lot of unpleasantness and as in any campaign, there was a lot of mis-direction on the part of both parties. In particular, I took issue with the charge that Sen. McCain was going to be a second President George Bush and that President Elect Obama was essentially a socialist.

Sen McCain isn't and wouldn't be a second President Bush. I suspect that he would have made a fine President, certainly better than our current one, because of his long experience in the Senate, and because of the nature to which he has worked. The election spinsters did an effective job of turning him into a much further right-winged politician, when he's shown himself to be a more moderate one at times. I don't think that I would have liked how he handled the war, or how he would have approached the financial crisis, but I would suspect that he would have maintains the status quo to some degree. Perhaps even made things better, if gradually. Most troubling was his selection of Gov. Sarah Palin, whom I saw as both a loose cannon, and someone far more unprepared for the office of the President if need be. Her selection showed that Sen. McCain was far more reactive than Obama, which is something that I don't think is healthy with that amount of power.

To the allegations that P/E Obama is a socialist - I disagree, and this is something that has been both spun out of control by the media and the popular labeling of people like 'Joe the Plumber'. P/E Obama's plan to raise taxes on a percentage of the population is a very small one - 4%, which isn't nearly the same thing as advocating state ownership or takeover of production, something that is never going to happen. While I think that raising taxes isn't going to be popular with those being taxed, I think that it would have a chance of working. I was somewhat disturbed to see the number of people who just took this campaign line at face value, with little thought or critical thinking about how this would play out. The Obama administration will still have to work with Congress and the American people to enact his plans.

As far as foreign policy and experience goes, I think my boss hit the nail on the head - The current administration was composed of a lot of experienced people, and look where that got us. We have squandered a national surplus, wracked up enormous amounts of debt and have fallen out of favor with the world because of our actions overseas, and particularly Guantanamo Bay. That being said, while experience is necessary, P/E Obama has an experienced VP in Sen. Joe Biden, as well as numerous qualified people around him as advisers. This is where the media should have been looking far more closely, because this really is where any president gains their policies from.

The Media has been a real mess and problem throughout the entire election cycle, and I'm very glad that I got rid of my cable in the past couple of months. There are far too many political hacks, who are blatantly partisan, who don't ask the questions that need to be asked, and merely perpetuate what each party was saying, but not what they were doing. Of all the political correspondents that I followed, John Stewart of the Daily Show was the only one who was really worth watching and listening to.

Overall, I felt that P/E Obama's campaign was far better than Sen. McCain's, right down to basic themes. The Obama Campaign was far more positive, held itself to a much higher level and held a candidate that was calm, collected and respectful. The McCain campaign, on the other hand, seemed to spend far more time attacking P/E Obama as a person, politician and a candidate and was far better at trying to instill fear into voters. While I don't see McCain as a main perpetrator of this, he's ultimately campaigning on that sort of thing.

All in all, this has been a fairly positive experience for the United States. It revealed many problems that are still underlying throughout the country, but despite these problems, we were able to elect a candidate that has fairly broad, but not universal, support, one who initially campaigned on education, and someone whom the world sees as a positive leader. While change is not going to come overnight, or most likely in this first term, it is a very important start for our generation, and it is something that I was immensely proud to have witnessed and participated in.

And of course, I was really impressed with the 'hologram' technology that CNN unveiled last night. Does anybody know - was that a true hologram, or just a computer projection worked into the broadcast? If anything, it was really impressive!

Paper Ballots

Why on earth doesn't everyone else utilize these? I just voted in Montpelier - No lines at all at 8 am - and used a paper ballot. Simple, one sheet, fill in the dots for your choice.

Not mine, but what I used

I'm watching NPR, Twitter and the New York Times and I'm seeing that there's massive problems with a lot of the new fangled technology for voting, and I have to wonder - why doesn't the rest of the country use a standardized ballot that is most likely cheaper and simpler to use, not to mention a hard copy record of what you just voted for? There's been a lot of talk about voter confusion as things change, but honestly? It seems like far too much work and added complexity with these things.

Technology can just plain suck.

Down to the Wire

I remember where I was exactly 4 years ago at this point. I was in a computer lab here at Norwich University, in the Cabot Wing, I'd just finished a geology lab, and was killing time before something else. Over the past year, there had been the campaigning between the parties, and eventually George Bush and John Kerry. I while I was sitting there, I was talking to a fellow student, a kid that I'd tutored in geology and asked him who he was voting for. Given that this was a military college, I wasn't terribly surprised that he said that he voted for Pres. Bush. When I asked him why, he told me that he wasn't sure, but he knew that he didn't like John Kerry very much. Thinking about it then, I realized that while I had made up my mind about who I would vote for, I didn't really think about why I was voting for any party.

Certainly, there were several reasons for why I was voting against Pres. Bush and siding with the democratic party. I was shocked at the way the war had begun to turn, and being the young, somewhat mindless liberal that I was, I was unhappy about the perceived arrogance in America's place in the world, at how we could simply impose and mislead nations and our own people to achieve something that I for one thought was the desires of a small group of people within the government.

Since that moment a number of years ago, I've been working to better understand the political world in the nation. I don't know that I see that specific moment as a turning point, but it is one that stands out in my mind as a point where I began to really question what was going on. I had, at many points, questioned the Republican party. But I had done little, if any questioning of the Democratic, or any of the smaller parties that seem to appear around an election, if however briefly. My views have changed and matured over these past couple of years.

Earlier this year, I attended the Society for Military History conference in Odgen Utah, where I was talking with our program director about politics. Somewhere along the line, I spoke to how I was disturbed at how much the government spends and wastes every year, and that to some extent, I believed far more in a sort of hands off approach to the government, such as when it came to business. He remarked that that it was fairly libertarian thinking for someone who described themselves as liberal. This made me question some more things about how I approach my views on politics.

I realized that it is impossible to pigeonhole an extremely complex set of beliefs and ideas into one or two 'sides', which makes this race even more frustrating than it already is. I like the idea of a smaller government. A character from The West Wing had a fantastic quote:

"I am a citizen of this country, I am not a special subset in need of your protection. I do not have to have my rights handed down to me by a bunch of old, white men. The same Article 14 that protects you protects me, and I went to law school just to make sure."

She was referring to the constitutional amendment in which women were specifically given the right to vote. I agree with her in theory, especially with something that she says later on, that more laws further limit, especially when there is already something in place that does the same thing. In practicality, however, some people seem to really need things laid out in plain, clear cut rulings in order for the desired effect. Of course women, blacks and whoever else is allowed to vote. But that didn't stop numerous people from preventing that desired effect for so long.

Thinking back to the fundamental differences between the parties, I still lean far more towards the left than I do the right, because of a couple of points that the right has picked up, which essentially boil down to two items - hypocrisies and discrimination.

I largely see the right, conservative wing of politics as something that is contradictory in nature, mainly with the issues that they support. While proponents to a smaller government, hands off, or whatever, there are still feelings that certain books should be banned from the public because of the content that they contain, the government will restrict who a person can marry or what they can do to themselves, while pushing for greater security while hiding behind the notion that if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about.

What frightens me the most is the introduction of religion into the far right that dictates much of the policy in the country at times. I have nothing against religion - I certainly don't believe that freedom of religion translates into first amendment violations or a freedom from religion, but I don't believe that the government should endorse or have anything to do with it, except for instances of attacks because of someone's religion. Religion in government has been used to discriminate against various minority groups around the country, which I can't support. This has transformed things far from the more traditional conservative view of governmental policy.

Furthermore, it seems to help continue a trend between logic/reason vs. belief and faith. The past eight years have shown that a governmental body can encourage the notion that knowledge is optional and that intelligence can be trumped by a gut feeling. This is a theme that will continue for decades and centuries to come, but in this day in age, it seems like a very sad thing to watch happen.

To be sure, the left wing of the nation is hardly better when it comes to certain issues. Rampent spending, redistribution of wealth, etc are not terribly solid ideas to begin with and can cause further problems. To some extent, I have to wonder if at times, the left and right, with the basic idea that people should be free from their governments. If anything, I see most liberal thinkers as increasingly isolated, operating in a vacuum when it comes to their beliefs. While this is the case with every extreme of the political spectrum, the left can seem to be far more idealistic, but far more clueless.

What has disturbed me the most in this current election has been the sheer amount of racism and idiotic misconceptions that have been perpetuated by national media and political junkies rooting for the various sides. Watching various news programs, I have been continually stunned at how people believe that Sen. Barack Obama is a Muslim, that he has been linked to terrorists, and at how my classmates and people around the nation have even been heard calling for him to be killed. I also find it sickening at how the notion of guilt by association is still alive and well in this country, fifty years after Sen. Joseph McCarthy started his campaign against communism. Similarly, I find it extremely annoying to continually hear that Sen. John McCain will be a President Bush 2.0, where he isn't - McCain, to me, seems to be far more moderate and less religiously inclined than Pres. Bush. Even more disturbing is how he's failed to silence or to little to stop rally-goers from yelling things such as Terrorist, kill him, and other derogatory things during speeches. Sen. Obama has proven himself to be a far better person by doing the opposite.

This election has brought out the best and the worst in our country, in my opinion. I could not have written this four or eight years ago, and I think that I've just touched the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what I believe. I sincerely believe that the next four years will get better. I hope that over these next four and hopefully eight years, this race will have started some change and realization between the two sides of the country.

Tomorrow is November the 4th, election day, and I hope to look back on it as the day the world changed.

Real Life Mirroring Fiction

The New York Times has an interesting article posted today about a number of startling similarities between the current presidential race and the fictional Santos/Vinick race in the television show The West Wing. When I first saw the entire series of the West Wing, I was drawn in by its realism and dialog. While it's not a perfect show, I've been told that it really captures what goes on in the White House.

What's interesting is the last two seasons, where President Bartlett's second term in office is coming to a close, and a new presidential race is coming up. In the race is Senator Matt Santos, a Hispanic Democratic senator from Texas, who enters the race wanting to change things up, bring a new perspective on Washington and goes from a relatively unknown contender, to a nationally known one after the first couple of races.

Sound familiar?

Similarly, the Republican candidate is Senator Arnold Vinick, who is a moderate conservative, who is direct and wants to control the spending in Washington. He's somewhat anti-religion in government, and was a member of the Senate for a long time.

The similarities are deliberate, to a point. Santos was directly based off of Senator Barack Obama, when the show's creators were looking for material. Sen. Obama had just given the speech that gave him wide recognition around the nation during the 2004 presidential election, and he was incorporated into the show. What's interesting is how similar this presidential race has become to the fictional one.I don't know to what extent McCain was used for Vinick, but I'm sure that there is some basis in his character, at least superficially.

A couple crisis' come forth at the tail end of the election - a nuclear power plant goes critical, while a major confrontation between Russia and China puts US troops in action in Asia, which puts both candidates in a tough spot when it comes to their own plans for office. Here, we've got the Iraq war, while longer, it is going to cause some problems for the candidates, and the current financial crisis that has exploded in the past couple of months, which will further crimp some plans. Interestingly, I haven't heard Obama talk a whole lot about education lately since the crisis has come out, but that could just be because I haven't been following the news lately.

I will be very interested to see just how well this race follows the West Wing race. In that one, Santos narrowly defeats Vinick. Vermont turns to be a red state (which was odd, although not unsurprising, considering the state's fiscal conservatism, which honestly makes me wonder a little just which way VT will go. I forsee Obama taking the state, but McCain making some good showing), and the vice presidencial candidate for Santos, Leo McGarry, dies of a heart attack. Hopefully, we'll have one of those three actually happening next week.