Obama Delivers Change

If you had told me, say, ten years ago, that an African-American president, vilified by huge swaths of southern and midwestern Americans as a socialist who doesn't really love his country, would run on a platform that included higher taxes, gay marriage, and easing restrictions on illegal immigrants, I would have had a simple reaction.

"Are you out of your freaking mind? That idiot will lose in a landslide."

If you had told me further that campaign finance laws would be gutted so that billionaires and corporations could donate unlimited amounts of money, and that hundreds of millions would be pledged for campaign ads against this candidate, that the No. #1-rated cable news network would abandon all pretense of being fair and balanced and launch a jihad against the candidate, that voting laws would be changed in a number of states in a clear effort to discourage turnout by young people, minorities, and the elderly, I would be shaking my head in despair.

I am not in despair today.

By running a smart, modern campaign that focused on winning swing states and getting a broad coalition of voters to turn out; by presenting a message that appealed both to Americans' sense of fairness and their economic self-interest; by providing steady, competent leadership over his first term that stood in stark contrast to the bizarre caricature of Obama that has been pushed relentlessly by Fox and other right-wing media outlets, President Obama convinced Americans that he could be trusted, and conversely, that his detractors could not.

When he first ran for President, Barack Obama talked a lot about change. He said semi-mystical stuff like, "We are the change we seek." This approach earned him some mockery from the right; notably in the form of Sara Palin--who is almost the complete opposite of Obama in many ways--when she said, "How's that hopey-changey stuff working out for you?"

Turns out it's working fine. Barack Obama did bring change, but he would not have been returned to office if the electorate hadn't itself been part of that change. America is changing. The electorate last week was younger, less white, less male, less conservative, less likely to be regular church-goers, than the electorate of past years. There are still white male voters like myself who will vote for Obama, but what allows him to win is that the rest of America prefers him strongly over what the Republican party offered this time around.

And it's not just demographics. It's ideas, positions, that are changing. Republicans can no longer win by bashing immigrants. They can no longer win by promising tax cuts. They can no longer win by rousing their base with anti-gay laws. I have to say, when the GOP-dominated Minnesota Legislature passed constitutional amendment referendums on gay marriage and voter ID last spring, I thought the cause was lost. I braced myself for both measures to win in November. But as time went on, I saw an amazingly energetic and committed marriage equality movement take shape in this state. The Voter ID debate was more muted, but with a savvy strategy (don't say Voter ID is wrong, say it's poorly written and needs to be fixed) and some effective late advertising, the anti-voter ID forces surged in the last weeks. And both amendments were defeated.

And it's my suspicion that the GOP's strategy of exclusion is itself one key as to why turnout was so favorable to Obama and Democrats last week. In Minnesota, there is evidence that the marriage and voter ID amendments actually increased turnout and brought more "No" votes to the polling booth--voters that also supported Obama and returned the Minnesota's Legislature to complete DFL control for the first time in decades. Nationally, it seems reasonable that the media attention given to voter-ID laws and the suppressive effect they have drove minorities and young voters to be even more motivated to vote.

The country still faces grave challenges, not the least of which is gridlock. Many in the GOP will retrench and return to their obstructionist ways, knowing that their safely-red districts will reward them for it. As time goes by, though, it seems likely that these dead-enders will become increasingly irrelevant.

But even with the difficult issues we face, Obama's promise is being fulfilled. We have seen change in America. Better yet, we have seen progress.