This sort of thing is why I’m not inclined to believe any of the Palin smears. It’s really astounding how polarized people are about her.

To start fighting the “Fairness” Doctrine.

Yes, I know that then-Senator Obama said that he didn’t support it, but do you think that he’d really veto it if it came to his desk? Really?

I was too tired last night to attempt to say much of anything intelligent, let alone eloquent. But I’ll start by repeating my congratulations to President-elect Obama. From snippets that I’ve heard this morning, his acceptance speech was appropriately gracious to his opponent, but I have to confess that I didn’t hear the whole thing because I had gone to bed. My impression is that it didn’t differ a lot from his stump speech, except he left out the lies about his opponents.

As I noted last night, one thing that I am not unhappy about, and is a large silver lining in a larger dark cloud, is that we have elected an African American (in this case, quite literally) to the highest office in the greatest nation on the planet. I always expected the first black president to be a Republican (or at least a conservative of some stripe), because I didn’t anticipate a Barack Obama, who between his apparent (not at all to me, but clearly to many) charisma and the aid of a fawning press that refused to discuss his history with any seriousness, managed to transcend not just his skin tone, but his far-left political history. I hope that Michelle is finally proud of America, and that we can finally get past race. But I fear that we’re not yet there, for those who are more comfortable continuing to play the easy role of victim. Either way, Barack Obama is the next American president, which means, for better or worse, that he is my president. (As usual) I agree with Lileks:

I’m off to the Mall to sell razor blades so people can scrape off their “Question Authority” bumper stickers. Just remember: Dissent is still the highest form of patriotism. Except now it will be practiced by the lowest form of people.

Seriously, though: congratulations to President-elect Obama. Right or wrong – and I hope for more of the former, obviously – he’s my President now, dammit, and I’m not going to spend four years treating him with the contempt the Kos side heaped on Chimpy McPretzelchoker. He could turn out to be a horrible President. He could turn out to be a great one. History pushes people in unexpected directions.

I am on long-standing record as calling him unelectable in this nation. How did I get it wrong?

I don’t think that his election was at all inevitable. It was a combination of many factors–the country going crazy in the wake of the financial crisis, the overwhelming amount of money brought to bear (much of it raised illegally) in his support, the truly egregious bias of the press, and an awful campaign by John McCain. I have to confess that I also expected the Clintons to do more than they did to sabotage him. It’s surprising, in retrospect, that it was as close as it was.

With regard to McCain’s campaign, Jennifer Rubin has a list of the many things that McCain did wrong, though I don’t know if he could have won it. But he could have made it a lot closer, and helped staunch the bleeding down ballot even more. The one thing she didn’t mention (though she hinted at it with some of her particulars) was that he should have been running against the most unpopular institution–Congress–which makes George Bush look like a rock star in popularity by comparison. He should have pointed out all of the things that have happened in the two years since the Democrats took over the Hill. Indeed, he should have simply pointed out that it was the Democrats who were running Congress, because much of the electorate seemed to be unaware of that fact. He shouldn’t have voted for the bailout bill. But he couldn’t do it, because he is John McCain. He is a great man, but a mediocre candidate, and would not likely have been a great president.

I’m glad that part of the reason that he lost is because of his own atrocious (and yes, that’s the word for it) and unconstitutional McCain-Feingold legislation, and that by completely blowing past it, Barack Obama has rendered it meaningless and irrelevant for future elections, even if it’s not actually rescinded. I would also note that while I do think that the Obama campaign violated federal campaign finance laws on a massive scale, by deliberately disabling AVS on their on-line credit-card donations, I also think that they’re bad laws. I hope that we can change them to remove contribution limits, but require full disclosure. Frankly, I don’t even care if foreigners want to contribute to American political campaigns, as long as we know who is doing it and how much. That is information that the voters deserve to know, and should be a legitimate campaign issue. The Clintons played the same dirty game, with Riady and the Chinese, but the media refused to dig into it and point it out.

And as I’ve noted before, because the press refused to air Obama’s dirty Chicago laundry during the campaign, we’re going to have another Clinton-like presidency, in which scandals from the past continue to pop up. Will he pardon Tony Rezko? Why didn’t anyone ask him? Will he replace Patrick Fitzgerald (indeed, every US Attorney, as Bill Clinton did)? I also fear that (as with the Clintons) the thuggery displayed in the campaign–against Sarah Palin, Joe the Plumber, anyone in Missouri who had the temerity to “lie” about the Obama campaign–will continue in the new administration, except this time with the full power of the Justice Department and the FBI behind it. It is going to be an interesting four years.

I’m glad that it wasn’t the blowout that many hoped for, and many feared. He won convincingly, but not sufficiently to have a mandate (particularly considering how gauzy his campaign promises were). Neither the House or the Senate had the gains expected by the Dems, and while having Stuart Smalley in the Senate would be entertaining (though not deliberately so on his part), I’m glad to keep one more vote to staunch a Democrat tide. I’m also glad that any changes on SCOTUS are likely to replace leftist squishes, and not true liberals (such as Roberts, Scalia and Alito), thus preserving the status quo rather than shifting it further against freedom.

I don’t envy the president elect. I pointed out when he won the nomination that it was almost an accident–he wasn’t supposed to win this year; it was just a practice run. Now, he’s in another moment of the dog who finally caught the car that he’s been chasing–what does he do with it? He’s got the choice of going with his leftist instincts (I’m assuming that he really does have these, and isn’t as completely cynical as he would have to be in order to have hung out with vile people with whom he completely disagreed politically, such as Ayers, Dorhn and Klonsky) and alienating much of the country (which truly doesn’t understand what they just elected), or moving to the center and being more politically successful, but outraging the Kossacks and Moveoners at his betrayal. That, too, will be interesting to watch.

My biggest feeling right now, frankly (and I’m sure that it’s one shared by almost everyone), is relief that this ridiculously long campaign is over. It’s time for defenders of human freedom to regroup, take stock of the world as it is, rather than as we’d like it to be, and figure out how to move it from the former to the latter. Whether the Republican Party will be the appropriate vehicle for this remains to be seen, but as has been clear to me for most of my adult life, the Democrat Party will never be. They remain children of Rousseau, though they don’t realize it, and I will continue to follow Locke.

[Update a while later]

Steven den Beste says it’s not the end of the world, and has some predictions, one of which is quite disturbing. I loved this ending line:

…no one will be spinning grand conspiracy theories about this administration’s Vice President being an evil, conniving genius who is the true power behind the throne.

If I were a praying man, I’d pray for Senator Obama’s health every day. I’m continuously amazed at people who think that Joe the Biden is presidential material, or even of above-average intelligence. Or even average.

[Another update a couple minutes later]

John McWhorter says that it should be the end of racism as a political issue, and makes the same point that Thomas Sowell has been making for years:

The new frontier, however, is apparently people’s individual psychologies: Not only must we not legislate racism or socially condone it, but no one is to even privately feel it.

The problem is we can’t entirely reach people’s feelings. The social proscription has changed a lot of minds, especially of younger people who never knew the old days. But an America where nobody harbors racist sentiment? The very notion goes against everything we know about human hardwiring: Distrust of the other is inherent to our cognition.

Psychology has provided us with no method for rewiring brains to eliminate that. After describing one of countless studies revealing subliminal racial bias, Nicholas Kristof recently intoned “there’s evidence that when people become aware of their unconscious biases, they can overcome them.”

Oh, really? “Can,” OK–but how often do they? How do we reach everybody? Do we mean overcoming bias so thoroughly that a test looking for what’s “out there” would not still reveal it? It’s a utopian pipe dream.

Now, if this racism of the scattered and subliminal varieties were the obstacle to achievement that Jim Crow and open bigotry were, then we would have a problem. But yesterday, we saw that this “out there” brand of racism cannot keep a black man out of the White House.

Might it not be time to allow that our obsession with how unschooled and usually aging folk feel in their hearts about black people has become a fetish? Sure, there are racists. There are also rust and mosquitoes, and there always will be. Life goes on.

It should be time, but as I said, it’s a lot easier to continue to play the victim, and blame white racism rather than community pathologies for your problems. I was glad to hear Barack Obama tell young men to pull up their damn pants, and hope he continues to do so. I hope that he comes up with a job in the administration of some sort for Bill Cosby.

My ongoing fear of the Rousseauians is that they believe that they can remake man. They believe in thought crimes, and will attempt to both detect them, and stamp them out.

[Update a few minutes later]

One other thought on racism. Does anyone imagine that, with his resume, Barack Obama would be president elect if he were Barry O’Toole, a white guy?

[Mid-morning update]

Tim Ferguson has thoughts on the battle for individualism.

[Update a few minutes later]

I (as is often the case) agree with Mark Steyn:

Obama was wrong about the surge, and McCain was right. But, because he was right, Iraq went away, and his rightness and Obama’s wrongness didn’t matter. And, in his closing address in that final debate, McCain was left using tough, hard words like “honor” and “sacrifice” that seemed utterly ridiculous after an hour and a half in which the candidates had been outcompeting each other to shower federal largesse for those behind with a couple of mortgage payments. But that gets to my basic point: You don’t want “issue” candidates. You want candidates who can place whatever the headlines happen to throw at you within an internally consistent worldview.

For what it’s worth, I never want to hear the word “maverick” again as long as I live. As I said a while back, that’s an attitude, not a philosophy.

I’m not unhappy that John McCain lost. He’s an admirable man, but much less so as a politician. I’m just unhappy that the Republicans couldn’t come up with someone better, and that the Democrat won.

I’m watching a rally in DC with Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi.

What has Harry Reid done to justify his increase of the majority of the Senate?

What has Nancy Pelosi done to justify her increase in her House majority?

Why did no one in the MSM ask these questions during the campaign?

Because long ago, it (and other parts of the upper midwest) embraced Obamanian policies. If things go the wrong way tomorrow, the nation will be Detroit writ large.

[Update a while later]

This reminds me of a post I wrote about the rise and fall of General Motors a while ago. As I noted there, my dad was a GM exec, and I grew up in southeast Michigan (well, to the degree that I’ve grown up at all…). In 1973, about the time I graduated from high school, we were deep in a recession (a real one–not what the people whining about today’s economy are describing, with 20+ percent unemployment in Flint), and the golden era was over, never to really return to what it had been.

Virginia Postrel has some thoughts:

In an interview Fairey assured Smith that his imagery “anti-propaganda propaganda” that, he suggested, is “coming from a position of moral integrity.” In other words, he believes it, or at least believes it’s in a good cause. The Obama posters were, of course, based on the famous propaganda image of Che Guevara. John McCain may suggest that Obama is a socialist. Fairey, a man of the left, literally paints Obama as a communist–which may involve much wishful projection as the belief in other quarters that the candidate is a secret free-trader.

Although campaign posters are surely a form of propaganda, the Obama imagery is so empty of specific exhortation that we do better to think of it as a manifestation of the candidate’s glamour–a seductive illusion in which the audience sees whatever they themselves desire. Glamour is manipulative, but not coercive. It requires the audience to suspend its skepticism and the object to maintain his mystery, a tacit form of cooperation. Give the object the power to compel devotion, and glamour is suddenly neither sustainable nor necessary.

Yes, though there’s actually a more accurate, more encompassing word than “socialist” or “communist” for this kind of political iconography (relating back to the thirties). It starts with an “F.”

Bill Whittle has some waning-days election thoughts:

If we are mark’d to lose, we are enow
To do our party loss; and if to live,
The fewer men, the greater share of honour.
God’s will! I pray thee, wish not one man more.
Let he which hath no stomach to this fight,
Let him depart; his passport shall be made,
And crowns for convoy put into his purse;
We would not vote in that man’s company
That fears his fellowship to vote with us.
This day is call’d the eve of Elect-ian.
He that votes this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when this day is nam’d,
And rouse him at the name of Republican
He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say ‘To-morrow is the fourth of November’
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his hands,
And say ‘With these I moved yon levers on election day.’
Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot,
But he’ll remember, with advantages,
What votes he did cast that day.

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that shares his vote with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;
And gentlemen and lady pundits now-a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,
And hold their book deals cheap whilst any speaks
That voted with us upon election day.

As he says, the asteroid is only inevitable if we believe it is.

Usually, when a politician makes a gaffe, they try to explain it away, or say “what I meant was…”

Lawrence Eagleburger has a novel approach. He just said to Stuart Varney on Cavuto’s show that “I was stupid,” to explain his gaffe. He made up for it, by 1) pointing out that the Democrat presidential nominee is much less prepared than she is, and wrong on the foreign policy issues and 2) apologizing to the McCain campaign and governor Palin.