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WE'RE GOING TO WIN THIS TIME
10/02/2008
It's easy to make a list of all the problems with the McCain candidacy, and all the reasons he would make a dreadful president.
He's too old.
He lies.
He comes across as a grumpy old man.
He's out of touch with the middle class (what's left of it.)
He chose the most unqualified person ever to be his running mate.
He's an impulsive hot head who changes his strategy whenever he needs to distract the public from some scandal or deficiency in the campaign.
His maverick, POW identity is stale, especially when he has to remind everyone every time he opens his mouth.
He is a Republican and too closely tied to the disastrous past eight years.
But none of those is the real reason why McCain will lose this election.
McCain will lose this election because he and his supporters fail to see the most important thing about this election: the rest of the world has changed dramatically in ways he doesn't understand, and now more than half of the voters in the United States have changed along with it.
This is largely a generational change. Keep in mind as I lay out my case that the only age group in which McCain leads in the polls is with those 60 and over (and even that seems to be changing). Although not all young people support Obama, and not all have changed, the reality is that the younger one is, the more likely one has changed with the rest of the world.
We are, I believe, at an historical change point in the United States. That turning point was inevitable as the rest of the world transformed itself and America's youth became more in touch with the world, in ways their elders did not. Young people are familiar with cultures outside of America, via the internet as well as travel and study abroad. Couple that with the past eight disastrous years of the Bush administration, and we see a younger America highly motivated to take the country in a new and better direction, more aligned with the rest of the Western world, if not the entire planet.
A little history lesson:
We know that World War II changed this country dramatically, but it also changed the rest of the world. We came away a super power, the rescuer of Europe, and the foremost arms manufacturer in the world. We did a lot of good things to help Europe after WW II, but we also got caught up in some paranoid thinking that determined decades of our foreign policy, resulting in an arms race and Cold War with the USSR, wars in Korea and Vietnam, and our current war in Iraq. In other words, we embraced war and arms build-ups as integral parts of our foreign policy and we focused on protecting ourselves from real and imagined enemies. We created a military industrial complex, which manufactured and sold arms to other nations and kept our own military budget in the stratosphere, depriving us of the funds to do things for the people.
Europe, on the other hand, rejected war after having two disastrous world wars fought on their own soil. They let the United States lead the way militarily after WW II, while they focused on their own development at home, rebuilding cities, creating social democracies that helped their citizens, and ultimately forming the European Union.
As Europe became more community minded and provided universal health care and free college educations, America went in a different direction. America pursued a conservative philosophy with a focus on privatization of services, creation of individual wealth, and increased demand for material prosperity. While Europe strengthened their middle class by providing services to all citizens, America weakened its middle class by destroying unions, sending jobs overseas, closing factories, and focusing on the acquisition of wealth through ownership and investments.
In the meantime, much of America's common wealth, i.e. taxes, was going to military budgets as a paranoid America pursued one insane war after another: Korea, Vietnam, Somalia, Bosnia, Iraq – twice, and Afghanistan.
America also endured a disruptive decade that brought political assassinations, drug experimentation, anti-war protests, inner city violence, civil rights demonstrations, a woman's revolution and sexual revolution, all of which led to a huge backlash with a return to conservative ideology and radical religion.
Those two forces - a conservative trend and a return to religious moralism - contributed to the rise of Ronald Reagan and the weakening of the Democratic Party, whose policies were more in line with those of Europe, but who were blamed for the chaos of the sixties. Reagan focused on the military, and wealth building, which he insisted would "trickle down" and employed a southern strategy of race baiting.
The downfall of Communism during the Reagan-Bush I administrations distracted Americans from the dangers of conservative economic ideology and the radicalism of some religious groups, but eight years of Bush II have finally woken up the young people, who have been talking to their parents and grandparents. The veil of deceit of conservative ideology and religious divisiveness has finally been lifted and the young people are saying "Enough."
A young man named Barack Obama came along at just the right time for these young people. Computer literate like themselves, a world traveler like themselves, an open minded deep thinker like themselves, they saw the kind of leadership they wanted. His relative youth didn't scare them. They know it is the thirty-somethings and forty-somethings who are running the new computerized world. His race didn't affect them. These young people are multi- culural in every way, having grown up with people of all races, nationalities and sexual orientation. The young college educated Americans also recognize great intelligence when they see it – broad intelligence that covers the many areas of expertise a president in this age needs, not the narrow political intelligence that secured the White House for George W. Bush. This is also the reason they reject Sarah Palin outright. She has the kind of political intelligence and charm that Bush has, but she possesses neither knowledge nor wisdom. She is an empty vessel, into which her handlers are trying to pour sound bites, and we all know the last thing we need in this time of multiple domestic and world crises is a sound bite leader.
The world has changed and up until this election, America lagged behind. While Europe rebuilt its infrastructure, American built weapons. While Europe provided health care for all, American promoted private insurance that excluded many. While Europe set aside medieval religious beliefs and turned to science, America let radical fundamentalist religions control several political elections and scoff at science. While Europe tried to do something about global warming caused by carbon emissions, America built bigger cars, demanded more oil, and went to war to secure it.
America got seriously off track and lost much of its greatness in the past thirty years, and especially in the past eight. The disastrous failures of conservative ideology and governance (including the Iraq War, the Patriot Act, torture, the shredding of the Constitution, Katrina, FEMA, the destruction of the middle class and the current financial crisis) have become all too apparent, especially to our young people who are educated in the ways of the rest of the world, have been abroad and seen other ways to live and to govern.
Of course, there are still die-hard conservatives among us, some of them also young. They mostly reside in the South, or the prairie states, or they belong to a fundamentalist or evangelical or authoritarian church.
But in this election, I believe, they are outnumbered by young and middle aged voters who know there is simply too much at stake to make this election about taxes or abortion or gay marriage.
We have a huge mess to clean up, a mess left by George W. Bush, and we have a lot of new work to do which will be made that much harder by the cost of cleaning up after the worst president in American history. The implementation of universal health care, policies to stop global warming, and plans to rebuild the nation's infrastructure all may be hampered by the debt incurred for an insane war and a financial meltdown that are the legacy of George W. Bush. Because of Bush, Obama may not get all the things done he wants to get done, but at least he can start, which is more than John McCain would ever do.
The young people, their parents and grandparents, have finally, I hope, come to see that John McCain still lives in the past, in the Hanoi Hilton, in the chaos of the sixties and the debate over Vietnam, in conservative economic ideology that has only led to financial chaos. John McCain's time has passed – it is the age of Obama, the age of the young, the age of change. This is why Obama drew a crowd of 200,000 in Germany. The world came out to see the man who they believe can bring back the America they once loved, the America that stood in solidarity with them during WW II and in the decade after, before America went crazy. This time, they are counting on the best man to win.
This time we will win.
All content © 2005 outragedcitizen.com
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