Seeing through the now

One thing that worries me a bit about the inevitable rout of McCain and the ascendancy of an Obama administration (aside from the enormous task that faces that administration) is the propensity of our press and pundits to quickly spin the "meaning" of the election and explain the results in real time. This focus on interpreting the results of great public exercise of an election tends to run to the near term and skews towards the ahistoric.

On November 5th, when we wake up after having elected this nations first black President in a landslide, the recriminations will run deep and the punditocracy will look for the usual suspects. My hunch is that the deepening and rolling economic crisis will be indicated as a key reason why the McCain candidacy failed, and in some ways it is one. Further, the absurdity of McCain, his inept and lurching strategy, his muddled and plainly contradictory messages and his bizarre and frankly irresponsible choice of Caribou Barbie as his running mate will also be cited.

But those are all derivative. What cannot be ignored and cannot be forgotten is that the election of Obama and the rejection of McCain is part of a larger statement made by the Republic. It is a repudiation of the failures of George Bush, a complete rejection of the man, his character, his words, his actions and his smug entitled philosophy of governance. If the economic troubles that the Second Bush Recession are the near term causes of our discontent, let us not forget that these troubles are his failure. The "MBA President" proved to be as incompetent and unsympathetic as Richard Fuld at Lehman, or Kenny Lay at Enron. When he speaks of the crisis he is unconvincing and seems blissfully unaware of the nuances, inevitably glossing over the differences between liquidity and insolvency, proving over and over again that he has not matured from his days as the failed CEO of Harken Energy. The aggressive effort to leave the credit default markets as unregulated and opaque as possible, led by Phil Gramm has much to do with where we find ourselves today, and it is an attitude towards regulation that springs directly from this President's head. The disdain for institutional oversight and the petulant disgust for our system of checks and balances pervades Bush's worldview, is something so grand even exists.

His foreign policy has been flatly rejected by all but a desperate few dead-enders, who lust for Arab blood and flatly consider "the other" a threat to our white, heterosexual, male-dominated protestant culture. The blatant fear-mongering and manipulation that this administration has wielded like a club on the American public has left the majority of the country weary, and as the slow moving disasters in Mesopotamia and Afghanistan grind on, the scales have fallen from the all but the most paranoid and angry jingoists.

For Bush's approach to government is in no way "conservative" and certainly not laissez faire. Thousands of signing statements directly undermining signed legislation is hardly "hands off", rather, it points to an aggrandized and obnoxious belief that the unitary executive should be unfettered, that the will of the people, expressed through our elected legislature is to be ignored, and that the wishes of a small group of privileged insiders should be paramount. This, and a cynical and opportunistic appeal to the inherent fear, racism and homophobia of a portion of our electorate has corroded and destroyed the Republican Party in America, and the inevitable result is McCain, an almost comical candidate that carries their standard today.

The complete failure of the Bush presidency cannot be forgotten, and cannot be ignored. There were too many people who were derided as unpatriotic and whose reputations were besmirched by this band of fools for stating the obvious, that this man is more than an incompetent buffoon, but rather a plague upon our country, a dangerously incurious vessel that happily acceded to the nefarious advice of a group of cynical, disdainful and ultimately wrongheaded advisors who brought shame and tragedy upon our heads.

This is why we have McCain and Palin, cartoon characters both. Don't let us forget that their failure is Bush's failure.