You see the point. Obama will lose those three per- ennial disa- ppoint- ments to modern America, Indiana, Missouri, and North Carolina. He won't get the cracker belt in Arkansas and Louisiana. He won't get the rural center - too obvious to be sad about. He won't get AZ. But he will get Florida and the other big battlegrounds. Amazingly Obama will win Virginia (I really feel bad for the Carolinas, trailing Virginia again). And he can add Colorado.
Clinton got 379 electoral votes.
They way they were: page down to look at the mug shots of the 90s rulers.
Obama is gonna win.
And then what?
California split? Red county vs. Blue county? Krugman's right to worry. Friedman's right to say "I can’t remember a presidential campaign that was so disconnected from the actual challenges of governing that will confront the winner the morning after." But this election is about a revolution in cultural capital and symbolic power.
This is why the possible advent of a "new FDR" is being announced in places like Bloomberg's financial news service. The 28 year reign of Reaganomics is over - by which I mean its existence as common sense and assumed ground rules (it still has lots of institutional power). That will make Obama's life easier than Clinton's on the economic front, as bad as the crisis is now.
But we're going to have to help him think up the next step.
2 comments:
Obama is gonna win.
And then what?
Exactly. We have SO much work to do if/when Obama wins. I'm prepared for anything, personally, but I know far too many people on the left who think everything is going to be solved with an Obama win, as if we don't have to do anything but mash the button while in the booth.
It's kind of frustrating.
Dear Crush - you need better friends! But in fact they won't stay on the couch for long because they are going to get very excited. The Right thought it had lost its country in the 1960s and that Reagan got it back for them in 1980. The result has been 28 years of really impressive, if often hateful, right-wing political activism. (Obama clearly went to school on these folks.) 1980 was the reversal of the symbolic victory of the Obama-conservative JFK. In 1960, the witch hunt politics of the 1950s, liberals felt like citizens again. They then did more rather than less. I predict the same for us, starting with neo-populist economics.
Love your blog. CN
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