By Callum MacKenzie
Staff Writer
So here we are: Barack Obama, the 47-year-old mixed race son of Kenya and Kansas, has won the 2008 presidential election, and will be president of the United States on January 20, 2009. His campaign was marked by a set of catchphrases: “Yes We Can,” “Change You Can Believe In,” that inspired millions in this country and almost inarguably won him the election. There is no question that Barack Obama has run one of the most effective campaigns in the history of this country. After demolishing Hillary Clinton, a candidate with better name recognition and credentials, in the Democratic Party primaries, Obama practically skated through the general election, pitted against John McCain, a candidate from an unpopular incumbent party whose campaign could not find a message.
And now, after two years of drama, , a man who has been in the senate for less than four years, and who has barely told us anything of his actual plans for running the country, is going to be president of the United States. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing; there is a long history of candidates with barely any experience on the federal level becoming great (or at least good) presidents: Abraham Lincoln and Bill Clinton come to mind.
On the other hand, and what I believe is more illustrative of the possibilities of an Obama presidency, there have also been absolute disasters of this archetype. The last time this country came to the end of a lengthy era and presidency marked by paranoia, war, and legendary infringements was in 1976, after Nixon, Vietnam, and Watergate had rocked the nation. Jimmy Carter, a relative nobody who was governor of Georgia for four years, was elected president, and in spite of his good efforts to the contrary, the US economy fell apart amid soaring inflation and gas prices, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, and Iran invaded the US embassy and took Americans hostage for almost a year. In fact, it was the disastrous Carter presidency that arguably lead to the rise of the terrible Christian Conservative movement that has done more damage over the past twenty-eight years than Carter’s ineptitude ever could have.
Of course, times are different now. When Nixon was president, senators held hearings about things that our senators now find trivial, and even used their power as a legislative body when it thought that these things were getting out of hand— things like illegal wiretaps, costly and unpopular wars and firings for political gain, for example.
Now our senators are so afraid of the president and of losing office that they actually write legislation that actively approves of these activities. Take 2008’s FISA bill, which gave unconditional amnesty to telecom companies that had been asked by the president to spy on Americans without warrants in spite of the fact that the senate had not viewed any of the records of the spying. This bill was called a “compromise” by the Democratic majority, in spite of the fact that it’s radical repudiation of privacy went far further than anything even proposed by the Republican majority in the years before. What does this have to do with president-elect Obama? He voted for it.
Not only did he vote for it, he voted for cloture so that his senate colleagues Chris Dodd and Russ Feingold could not filibuster the bill as promised. Hopefully, an Obama presidency will not be as mediocre as historical evidence and that which his senate record suggests, but before we all start jumping for joy about Obama’s win changing the country and the world, we should realize that the symbolism of his presidency will likely be more important than his actual presidency; we should ask ourselves, now that Obama has won, what will actually change?
