Sent to you by Sean McBride via Google Reader: The Big O via James Wolcott's Blog by James Wolcott on 6/16/08 "Let no one underestimate it. Barack Obama has won big," Immanuel Wallerstein writes in his latest commentary. "He has not only won the Democratic nomination for president. He is going to sweep the elections with a large majority of the Electoral College and a considerable increase in Democratic strength in both houses of the Congress." What gives Wallerstein such prognosticatory confidence? I have just done an analysis comparing McCain's state by state strength in the latest polls and Bush's proportion of the actual votes in 2004. In 45 of the 50 states, McCain is weaker, often much weaker, than Bush was. And in the other five, he is about the same. Of course, if Bush had won a state by a large margin, McCain will still win it albeit by a smaller one. But in the states that were close in 2004, the tide is in Obama's favor.
Furthermore, we have to realize that McCain is currently at the top of his strength. The Democratic Party is now reunifying and hungry for winning. Obama will lose almost none of the traditional Democratic percentages among women and Jews. He will increase the national percentage among Latinos and will bring in a very large number of young people and African-Americans who otherwise would not have voted. He will also get the votes of the considerable number of independents and Republicans disillusioned with Bush. The people who will vote against Obama because he is African-American were almost all already going to vote Republican. This issue is behind him, not in front of him. The Republicans, on the other hand, are still deeply divided and quite morose. The Christian right still doesn't trust McCain, and so far is dragging its feet... And while the Christian right scrapes its shoe leather, Obama has come a-courting. In a piece in the New York Post on the Obama campaign's "Joshua Generation Project," Maureen Callahan observes: Obama speaks easily and comfortably about his faith; McCain does not. Obama has been quietly courting evangelicals, holding an off-the-record meeting with the nation's biggest leaders in Chicago last Wednesday; McCain famously (and rightly) called Falwell and Robertson "agents of intolerance," then further alienated evangelicals by clumsily (and rightly) disposing of the Reverends Hagee and Parsley. In short, McCain seems to be ceding the religious right - which has voted Republican ever since Reagan - to the Democrats. "Obama is going to have more success with evangelicals than conventional wisdom might suggest," says Mark DeMoss, who runs one of the country's top evangelical PR firms... "It would not surprise me if he got up to 40 percent of the evangelical vote," DeMoss says... "I'm an orthodox Christian, and I am definitely drawn to Obama," says Patton Dodd, a 33-year-old editor at beliefnet.com. Dodd adds that many of his peers like Obama too: "Last week I had lunch with the publisher of the nation's main evangelical youth publishing company and the director of a big relief organization," he says. "They are hardcore Obama supporters. They donate." Dodd thinks that Obama's message of compassion for the sick and the poor, the critical state of the environment, and interfaith unity is particularly resonant; issues that were once non-negotiable, such as abortion, have been relegated by younger evangelicals to the dustbin of wedge issues. "I asked someone about abortion, and he said, 'I'm less concerned with policies that kill the unborn than policies that kill the living.' This generation wants the culture wars to be over. [my italics] We want a truce. We hate the metaphor that we battle for values." To read this in the pages of the New York Post--what a head-trip. Even if Obama wins as big as Wallerstein predicts, there will still be limitations on how much he can achieve, given the magnitude of the malignancies Bush will leave behind. But cleanup is one thing--the larger question is, how much of the Bush legacy is Obama willing to undo? Wallerstein: The biggest unknown is how far he will go to dismantle the quasi-police state structures that the Bush regime has instituted under the umbrella of a war against terrorism. This involves far more than appointing better judges. It means a radical revising of both legislation and executive policies and exposing the ultra-secret rules and practices to the light of day. Much can be done, as we know from what was accomplished in the 1970s, reining in the CIA and the FBI. But the situation is worse now and requires more. History may well judge Obama most of all on what he does in this domain. Up to now, he has been quite silent about this arena. The abolition of the Homeland Security department would be a nice place to start, but I'm not getting my hopes up. Things you can do from here: - Subscribe to James Wolcott's Blog using Google Reader - Get started using Google Reader to easily keep up with all your favorite sites
