I found this interesting article by Victor Davis Hanson. The guy is a Right Of Center academic and while you will disagree with what a lot has being said here, there is an underlying theme: Obama and the Democrats are not about to spread rainbows and moonbeams.

http://www.victorhanson.com/articles/hanson121608.html

And if I post nothing further in the next few weeks, may you Ressa, Kit and your others have a happy holiday period!

Bawrence, my concern is with relatively mindless reactions of many stripes, including both the one described by schmwarf and the one I suggested.

As I said, “may we all be satisfactorily disappointed.” I think that’s the best we can hope for.

While there may be such celebrations, the expections of the participants appear to be groundless, unless you’re a sucker for right-wing meme.

Are you willing to predict that people will not ululate nor fire off celebratory full-auto AK-47s at the exact same moment, all over the Umma?

Hey, I’m just askin’. Don’t mean any harm by it.

May we all be satisfactorily disappointed.

Question is though, will his term(s) in office be like his election campaign – style over substance? Catchphrases won’t solve the underlying causes of the people’s well being. My Prime Minister is an ex diplomat who speaks fluent mandarin and won the election based on a glossy Kennedy style campaign but to date, I’m not impressed.

Saying all of that though, Obama has to be better than W (not a stretch goal mind you).

I’m chuckling to think when I think how many people will turn a whiter shade of pale watching his inauguration when he says “I, Barack Hussein Obama…”

To really understand, you’d have to have been around here for the ‘88 elections. That was the year that Gary Hart was (temporarily) the Golden Boy. He energized the electorate, especially the young college voters who are normally apathetic. I was a local caucus delegate that year and it really was amazing the way he got people galvanized.

If Hart hadn’t been stupid enough to get caught womanizing, I think he would have won the presidency that year.

Obama had the same energizing effect this past year, and it was a lot broader than when Hart was a candidate. If Obama had been elected strictly on his racial heritage, he would have lost. One of the reasons that you saw Oprah Winfrey backing off after she basically went on television and said “What’s wrong with you Black people? This is our chance to elect a Black President!” is that there was a huge negative backlash from it.

However much anyone may have wanted Obama to be the first Black President, what everyone ultimately wanted was someone who is going to be an EFFECTIVE President.

Whether Obama is that man or not remains to be seen. The whole reason that this is a big deal, really, is that most people in the USA and, as far as I can tell, most people worldwide feel that Obama was elected based on who he is as a man and not on his genetics.

It’s interesting. Kenyans see him as a local boy who made good. As far as they’re concerned, he’s a Kenyan. One poster at the BBC summed it up by calling him the “President for the World”. His father was Kenyan. His early childhood was in Asia. His mother is American. Even in America, he was raised in Hawaii which has plenty of its own international community with both Asian and Polynesian roots.

In short, he’s not just “Black”, nor is he just “American”. From an international viewpoint, there’s a lot of hope that he will bring a perspective to the White House that hasn’t ever been seen there before.

Time will tell.

Even a hawke like McCain seemed better. At least his policy wasn’t determined by Big Church and Big Oil. Big Coal doesn’t seem as scary for some reason.

I think people are exicited with the fact that a cool handsome black man is elected. The media here did a sloppy analogy from Slavery to Presidency. Never mind that none of his forebears have anything to do with American black slaves.

Don’t get me wrong, I think he’s the lesser of two evils but I think electing him base on racial preference is wrong wrong wrong.

The day after Election Day, I spent some time browsing random news websites around the world that had public forums, the BBC in particular. I won’t suggest I did any kind of definitive analysis, so take these as my impressions.

What I found was that the Obama election is seen as a sign of hope all over the world. It’s not just that a lot of people see it as a sign of progress for the USA. That IS true, but it goes beyond that. There are a LOT of “ordinary people” in places all over who are looking at Obama’s election as a sign that things are going to change for the better EVERYWHERE.

Understandably, in places like the Middle East, that enthusiasm was a lot more muted and tempered with cynicism. Despite that, the undercurrent of hope was still there.

I don’t know how long it will last, but the thing that seems clear to me at this point is that Obama isn’t just a politician just now. He’s a symbol. If his administration actually manages to “fix” things for awhile and that prosperity radiates to the rest of the global economy, then I think you’re going to start seeing Saint Obama as a ridiculous yet not overly-far-fetched reality.

In any case, whatever happens down the road, the American people have raised themselves in the estimation of much of the rest of the world. How that will translate into political clout, I couldn’t say. The reason I find it interesting is that it so clearly has nothing to do with politics. It seems that on a much more visceral level, the election has given a lot of global citizens the hope that a change like this for the USA means that an even bigger and better change can be made for the entire world.