'Mission accomplished - Part 1By Julian Delasantellis
Even with the polls relatively close until the end, I could see the results of the American presidential election in a walk I took in early October at a swap meet - for non-US folk, an unofficial bring-and-buy street market - in downtown Los Angeles. There, amid all the clunky gold chains, bling medallions and pink taffeta party gowns, I was amazed to see large numbers of Barack Obama T-shirts.
The flimsy materials and cheap silk-screening made it obvious that these were not official products of the Obama campaign, like the designs, which seemed to imply that Obama's running mate in the campaign was not Joe Biden of Delaware but the late Bob Marley of Jamaica.
I tried to think of a previous Democratic Party nominee who had engendered such excitement. Who else would have spurred the micro-capitalists who sell their wares at swap meets to such endeavors? It certainly would not have been Michael Dukakis, the intelligent but crushingly, deathly dull Massachusetts governor who was the party's choice in 1988. Perhaps the only people who might have admired his style in charisma and excitement sufficiently to put his face on a T-shirt would be the likes of the Middle Atlantic Express Train Schedulers Association.
So Obamamania, the nationwide phenomenon that manifested itself everywhere
- from the rallies where just the candidate's presence caused young people to faint away to the adult toy stores where the senator's image was drawn on the most unlikely of devices - carries the day. The question now becomes, can he even come close to meeting the ferocious expectations for a better life, in a better country, that were raised by him during the campaign?
For most of the time since Obama clinched the nomination from Senator Hillary Clinton in June, he carried roughly a 3-5% lead in the polls; this briefly flipped to a similar lead for John McCain after the choice of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as the Republican vice presidential nominee.
That effect faded as soon as Palin opened her mouth. Still, the McCain/Palin campaign was doing a serviceable job of maintaining contact with Obama-Biden until it hit the iceberg - the month-long financial and stock market collapse that started with the failure of investment bank Lehman Brothers on September 22.
When the Titanic's lookouts cried out "iceberg, right ahead", it was obvious that the ship was doomed. Likewise for the McCain campaign on the breaking dawn of the September financial crisis.
Most Americans supplant the relatively paltry returns of the government's old-age social security pension support plan with stock investments in tax-advantaged holding accounts called 401-Ks. When stocks fell to six-year lows in early October a lot of dreams of early retirements on sun-splashed Florida fairways had to be supplanted by nightmare images of dragging tired, arthritic bones every morning until death to their station at the fast food french-fry cooker.
Indeed, the financial crisis probably has gone a long way towards solving the long-term funding crisis of social security, in that now millions of Americans won't be able to retire and draw on the system, given that the stock portion of their retirement package is now worth so much less.
McCain/Palin tried everything, throwing the kitchen sink, indeed, the entirety of the house's plumbing, at their opponent - calling him a terrorist sympathizer, a socialist, even a communist. All for naught.
Americans listened to the Republican charges, weighed them against the prospect of ending their lives as galley slaves rowing away their last days for the McDonald's empire, and decided that giving the terrorist/socialist/communist a chance wasn't such a bad idea.
Last December, with the economy not nearly in as dire straits as it is now, McCain pooh-poohed the idea that he should even be all that concerned with matters economic by telling The Boston Globe, "The issue of economics is not something I've understood as well as I should, I've got [ex Federal Reserve head Alan] Greenspan's book."'
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