John McCain had Joe the plumber.
Barack Obama had the rest of America - or at least 63 million of his fellow countrymen and woman.
It was, as it turned out, a rout. Obama, the Democrat, earned twice as many electoral college votes than did McCain, his worthy Republican opponent. Obama turned the country blue, winning the usual big Democratic states, (New York, California, his home state of Illinois), but going far beyond what any Democrat has done since Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964.
Obama won the Midwest - Iowa, Wisconsin, even turning Indiana blue, a state that had not voted for a Dem presidential candidate since LBJ in `64. The Rust Belt was his as well. Despite many efforts by the Republicans to turn Obama into a scary black guy, most working class whites in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania didn’t buy it. He won Michigan and Pennsylvania by big margins, Ohio not by a lot, but enough to deprieve McCain of a state he had to have.
Out west, Obama’s national strategy paid big dividends when New Mexico, Colorado and Nevada all went from red to blue, with the Democrat sweeping the Hispanic vote in each state enroute to his big win. And perhaps most impressively, Obama won what Politico.com called “the new South,” the states of Florida, Virginia, and most incredibly, North Carolina, the state of the old segregationist, Jesse Helms.
The rout of the Republicans was so complete, that GOP analyst Rod Dreker wrote on a National Public Radio website that his party “will be wandering around for some time like a google-eyed Wile E. Coyote after he’s had an anvil dropped on his head.”
Barack Obama, the son of a Kenyan father and a mother from Kansas, beat John McCain, Vietman War hero and the son of a Naval admiral by a margin of 52-to-46 percent, the first time since LBJ blew out Barry Goldwater in `64 that a Dem has gained north of 51 percent of the vote in a presidential election. Only in America, in the words of Fox News commentator Juan Williams, “could you have a significant minority that was once so maligned and so oppressed, and now finally, have one of its sons rise to this level. I don’t care how you feel about him, (Obama), politically, on some level you have to say this is America at its grandest.”
The sweep of nearly 30 years, from Ronald Reagan’s rout of the Democrats in 1980, to Barack Obama’s astonishing victory on Nov. 4, 2008, is a testament to how far the political pendulum in this country can swing - and has swung. Reagan helped to revive a bedraggled nation - weighed down by a decade of soaring inflation, rising energy prices, and the national humiliaton of Americans held as hostages in their own embassy by a crazed Iranian government in Tehran.
Obama, too, would be elected on the heels of a national economy gone bad, as well as the same general early 1980ish vibe that the nation is headed on the wrong track in a major way, with a deeply unpopular president, (Carter in 1980, Bush in 2008), the source of much disdain. Reagan, the conservative icon, had the ability to inspire. Obama, the pragmatic liberal, does that in spades. Reagan used humor and a warm smile to disarm his critics. Obama did the same in his debates with McCain, and exhibited the same sort of above-the-fray feel Reagan usually displayed in his campaigns.
Beyond that, of course, these two politicians have almost nothing in common other than their country of birth, and the fact that they both befuddled their adversaries. Like Reagan, Obama’s victory was complete. This was no George W. Bush fluke win in 2000, or beating John Kerry by a couple of hundred thousand votes in Ohio to gain re-election in `04. Obama prevailed over McCain in about every age group and demographic, even beating the Republican in the all-important independent voter group by 52-44 percent. Among all white voters, Obama received 43 percent of that vote, which is two percentage points better than what Kerry did in `04.
The completeness of the Obama victory is such that it neutered all of the ususal wedge issue politics Republicans have long practiced, as perfected by the former political genius/has-been Karl Rove, to demoninze Democracts. It was all tried against Obama, the socialist, wealth redistributor, terrorist, Muslim, foreign-born African who was also against guns owners and for gays. And, somehow, it didn’t work, the swift boaters sank.
“The more the other side whined and pointed fingers, the higher Obama’s star climbed,” writes Matt Taibbi, of Rolling Stone magazine. “Obama isn’t interested in jacking up anybody’s bloodlust - a new thing in modern American politics.”
Now comes the hard part, the work of making it all work. Obama struck that tone in a somber victory speech before tens of thousands in Chicago. They were ready to party, but Obama nixed the fireworks and the rally-like feel. America, he said, has a long way to go to making things better for its people.
Still, for the young African-American girl in Atlanta, who feel to her knees, put her face in her hands and wept uncontrollably on national television after Obama pushed past 270 electoral votes, a lot of the work had already been done. You really can grow up to be anything you want to be in America.
Barack Hussein Obama is president-elect of the United States of America. A man has been judged by the content of his character, not the color of his skin, just like the preacher from Atlanta dreamed in the 1960s.
And 63 million Americans made him the president - and made the dream come true.
- R.D. Cavazos
