The Cobra's Magical Mystery Tour (Of DC)

The Election of 2008 wouldn't be complete without a dose of Cobra venom. The Cobra poses the Question O'The Day: Is The Hopester in over his head or will he get his own monument in DC someday? This blog has put its money on the latter possibility. If this is (fair & balanced) optimism, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
Bring on the Puppy and the Rookie
By Maureen Dowd

I walked over to the White House Tuesday night and leaned against the fence. How can such a lovely house make so many of its inhabitants nuts?

There was no U-Haul in the driveway. I don’t know if W. was inside talking to the portraits on the wall. Or if the portraits can vanish from their frames, as at Hogwarts Academy, to escape if W. is pestering them about his legacy.

The Obama girls, with their oodles of charm, will soon be moving in with their goldendoodle or some other fetching puppy, and they seem like the kind of kids who could have fun there, prowling around with their history-loving father.

I had been amazed during the campaign — not by the covert racism about Barack Obama and not by Hillary Clinton’s subtext when she insisted to superdelegates: “He can’t win.”

But I had been astonished by the overt willingness of some people who didn’t mind being quoted by name in The New York Times saying vile stuff, that a President Obama would turn the Rose Garden into a watermelon patch, that he’d have barbeques on the front lawn, that he’d make the White House the Black House.

Actually, the elegant and disciplined Obama, who is not descended from the central African-American experience but who has nonetheless embraced it and been embraced by it, has the chance to make the White House pristine again.

I grew up here, and I love all the monuments filled with the capital’s ghosts. I hate the thought that terrorists might target them again.

But the monuments have lost their luminescence in recent years.

How could the White House be classy when the Clintons were turning it into Motel 1600 for fund-raising, when Bill Clinton was using it for trysts with an intern and when he plunked a seven-seat hot tub with two Moto-Massager jets on the lawn?

How could the White House be inspiring when W. and Cheney were inside making torture and domestic spying legal, fooling Americans by cooking up warped evidence for war and scheming how to further enrich their buddies in the oil and gas industry?

How could the Lincoln Memorial — “With malice toward none; with charity for all” — be as moving if the black neighborhoods of a charming American city were left to drown while the president mountain-biked?

How can the National Archives, home of the Constitution, be as momentous if the president and vice president spend their days redacting the Constitution?

How can the black marble V of the Vietnam Memorial have power when those in power repeat the mistake of Vietnam?

How can the Capitol, where my dad proudly worked for so many years, hold its allure when the occupants have spent their days — and years — bickering and scoring petty political points instead of stopping White House chicanery and taking on risky big issues?

How can the F.D.R. Memorial along the Tidal Basin be an uplifting trip to the past when the bronze statue of five stooped men in a bread line and the words of F.D.R.’s second inaugural — “I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad and ill-nourished” — evokes the depressing present?

Obama may be in over his head. Or he may be heading for his own monument one day.

His somber speech in the dark Chicago night was stark and simple and showed that he sees what he’s up against. There was a heaviness in his demeanor, as if he already had taken on the isolation and “splendid misery,” as Jefferson called it, of the office he’d won only moments before. Americans all over the place were jumping for joy, including the block I had been on in front of the White House, where they were singing: “Na, na, na, na. Hey, hey, hey. Goodbye.”

In the midst of such a phenomenal, fizzy victory overcoming so many doubts and crazy attacks and even his own middle name, Obama stood alone.

He rejected the Democratic kumbaya moment of having your broad coalition on stage with you, as he talked about how everyone would have to pull together and “resist the temptation to fall back on the same partisanship and pettiness and immaturity that has poisoned our politics for so long.”

He professed “humility,” but we’d heard that before from W., and look what happened there.

Promising to also be president for those who opposed him, Obama quoted Lincoln, his political idol and the man who ended slavery: “We are not enemies, but friends — though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection.”

There have been many awful mistakes made in this country. But now we have another chance.

As we start fresh with a constitutional law professor and senator from the Land of Lincoln, the Lincoln Memorial might be getting its gleam back.

I may have to celebrate by going over there and climbing up into Abe’s lap.

It’s a $50 fine. But it’d be worth it.

[Maureen Dowd received the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1999, with the Pulitzer committee particularly citing her columns on the impeachment of Bill Clinton after his affair with Monica Lewinsky. Dowd joined The New York Times as a reporter in 1983, after writing for Time magazine and the now-defunct Washington Star. At The Times, Dowd was nominated for a 1992 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting, then became a columnist for the paper's editorial page in 1995. Dowd's first book was a collection of columns entitled Bushworld: Enter at Your Own Risk (2004). Her second book followed in 2005: Are Men Necessary?: When Sexes Collide. Dowd earned a bachelor's degree from DC's Catholic University in 1973.]

Copyright© 2008 The New York Times Company

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Eags Thinks That Texas Will Be The Pefect Place For The Dubster's Retirement

23% of Texans believe that The Hopester is a Muslim. The Lone Star State will be even dumber when The Dubster comes back to Texas in January. His departure means that the IQ-level in DC will go up and that of Texas will decline on January 20, 2009. Of course, it could be worse, The Mighty Quinnette (who believes the capital of Africa is Stupidville) might move to Texas. If this is (fair & balanced) ignorance, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
This American Moment — The Surprises
By Timothy Egan

Guess who won Joe the Plumber’s vote. Not Joe the symbol and unlicensed tax-dodger coming soon to a garage sale near you, but real people who make about $42,000 a year, the median income for plumbers and pipefitters.

Barack Obama carried hard-working Americans of that income stripe by 10 points, according to exit polls.

And the only voters who were told directly that their taxes would go up under a new Democratic president? Obama took the rich as well, winning by six points that small sliver of the electorate that makes more than $200,000 year. Soak ’em.

As for the Bradley effect, there was none. Perhaps a Reverse Bradley – in which more people actually voted for the black guy than they told pollsters.

Witness Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan, three prime states where working-class whites were supposed to be saving their true racial feelings for the privacy of the voting booth. Obama won Michigan by 16 points, Pennsylvania by 11 and Ohio by four. In each case, the vote was well above the election eve average of all polls. Hillary Clinton voters came home. Ditto Reagan Democrats. Did I mention that Obama won the Catholic vote — and Scranton, the iconic blue-collar town?

Overall, the pollsters mostly got it right — and a tip of the hat to Scott Rasmussen for nailing the popular vote, 52 percent to 46, and to my friend Johnny Verhovek, age 15, for predicting the exact number of electoral votes in my local betting pool.

In my younger and more vulnerable years, my father gave me some advice on the question of what to do when your dreams come true: don’t tell anyone.

Conversely, what do we do when our darkest fears, our hardened conventional wisdom and our historic homilies are all found to be hooey? Shout it from the rooftops.

This was a transformative election, but not because there was some big lurch to the left or an unequivocal rejection of the right. The culture is confused, as always. Gay marriage lost in liberal California, in Florida and Arizona. But abortion restrictions were voted down in conservative South Dakota. And 73 percent of voters in Colorado disagreed with a longheld Republican contention that human life begins at conception.

This was the first real 21st century election — rejecting the incompetence of the Bush years, the race-baiting of Karl Rove’s majority strategy and the poison of media-driven wedge politics. As a nation, we rejoin the world community. As a sustaining narrative, we found our story again.

Obama’s ascendancy is likely to have the ironic effect of ending affirmative action, and the old identity politics. He became only the second Democrat since Franklin Roosevelt to win more than 51 percent of the popular vote not because he’s black, but because he is smarter, with better ideas, and showed leadership under fire. This was a victory for meritocracy.

If affirmative action survives, it will be more class-based, as Obama suggested on the campaign trail.

In losing the urban vote and the suburbs as well, the Republican party is now a shrinking regional party of older white males, represented in the media by talk-radio kooks and far-right women dressed in high couture to sell low-culture friction.

Obama won the New South of Virginia, Florida and perhaps North Carolina. He flipped three states in the New West, Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico. He won the fastest-growing ethnic group, Latinos, by better than a 2-1 margin. As for the young, nobody since modern polling of age groups began has racked up a better percentage of the 18- to 29-year-old vote. Obama won 66 percent of the kids.

And sure, the youth vote is only 18 percent of the total electorate, but that’s still a bigger slice than those over 65 years of age (one of the few McCain cohorts).

See the trend: new, emerging, growing, tomorrow, young. Dormant for the darkest years of the Bush presidency, the oldest strain of American DNA is evident again.

For Republicans, the trouble is deep and spreading. They nearly lost Montana, Missouri and the most populous county in Idaho, a state where a Democrat was just elected to Congress. When this kind of thing happens in Idaho, it’s time to start reading up on the Whig party for history lessons.

Even Texas tightened from four years ago. But do 23 percent of Texans really think Obama is a Muslim, as a recent poll found? If reality indeed has no home on the Texas plains, it’s the perfect place for Bush to retire.

One of the better lines in Obama’s election night speech was a slap to the rejectionist politics of Bush. Rove always insisted a president only needed 50 percent plus one to win. And Bush governed that way, permanently angering half the population.

On Tuesday night, Obama reached out to the other half. For those who did not vote for him, he said, “I will be your president, too.”

What an idea — simple and obvious. But like so much American common sense, it’s been missing for too long.

[Timothy Egan writes "Outposts," a column at the NY Fishwrap online. Egan — winner of both a Pulitzer Prize in 2001 as a member of a team of reporters who wrote the series "How Race Is Lived in America" and a National Book Award (The Worst Hard Time in 2006) — graduated from the University of Washington with a degree in journalism, and was awarded an honorary doctorate of humane letters by Whitman College in 2000 for his environmental writings. Egan is the author of four other books, in addition to The Worst Hard Time — The Good Rain: Across Time and Terrain in the Pacific Northwest, Lasso the Wind: Away to the New West, Breaking Blue, and The Winemaker's Daughter.]

Copyright © 2008 The New York Times Company

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The Circle Is Unbroken

This blog's friend in the Dairy State. Tom Terrific, forwarded a viral e-mail containing an election day meditation by the daughter of George C. Wallace and Lurleen Wallace. When this blogger was an undergraduate (and men were living in caves), Governor George C. Wallace came to speak on the DU (University of Denver) campus. Wallace was making the preliminary steps in the first of his four presidential quests, this time in the campaign of '64. Governor Wallace was surrounded by burly Alabama state troopers that time. Later, during his last presidential campaign — 1972 — Wallace was the victim of an attempted assassination during an appearance in Laurel, MD. Although he survived the four gunshots fired by Arthur Bremer, Wallace spent the remainder of his life in a wheelchair. On November 4, 2008, George Wallace's daughter, Peggy Wallace Kennedy, supplied a comment to CNN about the election of Barack Obama. If this is (fair & balanced) living revisionism, so be it.

[x CNN]
Commentary: My Father, George Wallace, And Barack Obama
By Peggy Wallace Kennedy

I heard a car door slam behind me and turned to see an elderly but spry woman heading my way.

The night before, a gang of vandals had swept through the cemetery desecrating graves, crushing headstones and stealing funereal objects.

My parents' graves, situated on a wind-swept hill overlooking the cemetery, had not been spared. A large marble urn that stood between two granite columns had been pried loose and spirited away, leaving faded silk flowers strewn on the ground.

I was holding a bouquet of them in my arms when the woman walked up and gave me a crushing hug. "Honey," she said, "you don't know me, but when I saw you standing up here on this hill, I knew that you must be one of the girls and I couldn't help myself but to drive up here and let you know how much me and my whole family loved both of your parents. They were real special people."

I thanked her for her kind words as we stood side by side gazing down at the graves of Governors George Wallace and Lurleen Wallace.

After a few moments, the woman leaned into me and spoke almost in a conspiratorial whisper. "I never thought I would live to see the day when a black would be running for president. I know your daddy must be rolling over in his grave."

Not having the heart or the energy to respond, I gave her bony arm a slight squeeze, turned and walked away. As I put the remnants of the graveyard spray in the trunk of my car, I assumed that she had not bothered to notice the Barack Obama sticker on my bumper.

When I was a young voter and had little interest in politics, my father would mark my ballot for me. As I thought about the woman in the cemetery, I mused that if he were alive and I had made the same request for this election, there would be a substantial chance, though not a certainty, that he would put an "X" by Obama's name.

Perhaps it would be the last chapter in his search for inner peace that became so important to him after becoming a victim of hatred and violence himself when he was shot and gravely injured in a Laurel, Maryland, shopping center parking lot. Perhaps it would be a way of reconciling in his own mind that what he once stood for did not prevent freedom of opportunity and self-advancement from coming full circle; his final absolution.

George Wallace and other Southern governors of his ilk stood defiantly in the 1950s and '60s in support of racial segregation, a culture of repression, violence and denial of basic human rights.

Their actions and the stark images of their consequences that spread across the world galvanized the nation and gave rise to a cry for an end to the American apartheid. The firestorms that were lit in Birmingham, Oxford, Memphis, Tuscaloosa, Montgomery, Little Rock and Selma were a call to arms to which the people responded.

And now a new call to arms has sounded as Americans face another assault on freedom. For if the stand in the schoolhouse door was a defining moment for George Wallace, then surely the aftermath of Katrina and the invasion of Iraq will be the same for George W. Bush.

The trampling of individual freedoms and his blatant contempt for the rights of the average American may not have been as obvious as an ax-handle-wielding governor, but Bush's insidiousness and piety have made him much more dangerous.

Healing must come, hope will be our lodestar, humility will reshape the American conscience, and honesty in both word and deed will refresh and invigorate America, and having Barack Obama to lead will give us back our power to heal.

My father lived long enough to come to an understanding of the injustices borne by his deeds and the legacy of suffering that they left behind. History will teach future generations that he was a man who used his political power to promote a philosophy of exclusion.

As his daughter, who witnessed his suffering in the twilight of his years and who witnessed his deeds and heard his words, I am one who believes that the man who, on March 7, 1965, listened to the reports of brutality as they streamed into the Governor's Mansion from Selma, Alabama, was not the same man who, in March of 1995, was welcomed with open arms as he was rolled through a sea of African-American men, women and children who gathered with him to welcome another generation of marchers, retracing in honor and remembrance the historic steps from Selma to Montgomery.

Four years ago, the young Illinois senator who spoke at the Democratic National Convention mesmerized me. I hoped even then that he would one day be my president.

Today, Barack Obama is hope for a better tomorrow for all Americans. He stands on the shoulders of all those people who have incessantly prayed for a day when "justice will run down like waters and righteousness as a mighty stream" (Amos 5:24).

Perhaps one day, my two sons and I will have the opportunity to meet Barack Obama in person to express our gratitude to him for bringing our family full circle.

And today, the day after the election, I am going to ride to the cemetery so that if asked, I can vouch for the fact that the world is still spinning but my father lies at peace.

[Peggy Wallace Kennedy is the daughter of George C. Wallace and Lurleen Wallace, who both were governors of Alabama. She lives in Montgomery, Alabama, with her husband, Mark Kennedy, a retired state Supreme Court justice. They have two sons, Leigh, a decorated veteran of the Iraq war, and Burns, a college sophomore.]

Copyright © 2008 Cable News Network

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