Blogospheric Reactions

Jeff Alworth

While we wait impatiently for results on the Senate race, here's a sampling of some of the deeper thoughts about what Obama's win means.

Paul Krugman
A magnificent victory for Barack Obama. And bear in mind that the campaign, in its final stages, was really about different philosophies of governing. This wasn’t like the 2004 campaign, which was essentially fought over fake issues — Bush running on national security and social issues, then claiming that he had a mandate to privatize Social Security. In this election, Obama proudly stood up for progressive values and the superiority of progressive policies; John McCain, in return, denounced him as a socialist, a redistributor. And the American people rendered their verdict.

Kevin Drum
Tonight has been both a great triumph for common sense and a final, emphatic rejection of the Texification of the Republican Party. Barack Obama's victory has been huge, and his coattails have proven to be everything Democrats could have hoped for, with pickups of at least five Senate seats and more than a dozen House seats. Conservatives will do their best to spin things otherwise, but there's little question that the country moved decisively from center right to center left tonight.

Noam Scheiber
Which is to say, the big divide last night wasn’t between working-class whites (i.e., whites without college degrees) and educated whites. It was between working-class whites who are relatively well off, and working-class whites who aren’t. The aforementioned numbers imply that Obama struggled hugely among working-class whites making more than $50,000 per year, but did well among those making less than that. The upshot was that, despite losing the white working-class by wide margins nationally, Obama came reasonably close in the economically depressed states of the industrial Midwest (down only 8 in Ohio and Indiana, actually up 6 in Michigan). Hence the electoral college landslide.

Matt Yglesias
Mostly I think it’s a reminder that events matter. By 2006, the consequences of conservative governance were clear to a majority of the public, who registered their displeasure at the polls. But the lame-duck conservative president and a filibuster-happy conservative minority in the Senate blocked efforts to take the country in a substantially new direction. Two years later, the consequences of conservative governance and of conservative obstruction were even worse. So the public has once again expressed its displeasure at the polls. The vehicle — an unlikely candidate with an uncanny talent for political oratory and organizing who didn’t fundamentally rethink the nature of the progressive agenda but did help sharpen public demand for change into an effective political movement for change.

Harold Meyerson
My [94-year-old] mother grew up in Tennessee -- born in Memphis, raised in Nashville. The first election she can remember, in 1928, pitted Herbert Hoover against Al Smith, and when she called last night, she recalled how Smith’s Catholicism alarmed many of her neighbors: “What’s going to happen if we elect a Roman Catholic?” she remembered one neighbor worrying. The thought of an African-American president, of course, simply hadn’t occurred to anyone.

Mark Schmitt
Last night I was at the BBC for a long while, for a short radio interview, and I saw John Bolton, who was on for a long TV segment in which he puffed about the coming backlash against Obama's socialist economics, the pointlessness of diplomacy, and voter fraud; and Mark Penn, who talked about the need for Obama to govern like the later Clinton, from the center-right. Each man is sort of despicable (although in very different ways and it's not fair to compare evil with shmuckiness) -- and once upon a time we all expended a lot of ink and energy on their failings. (Well, on Penn, I did!) And now, each is a relic, a figure from another era in American politics: the era of vicious conservatism and those who tried to tiptoe around it. We're done with that, and with them.

Steve Benen
Are you sure it's a good idea to hold a rally in Germany? Are you sure you want to campaign in non-traditional states, instead of investing everything in the major battleground states? Are you sure it's wise to avoid the kind of sleazy attacks the Republicans are using? Are you sure you want to forgo the convention center and deliver an acceptance speech outside, before 75,000 at a football stadium? Are you sure you can afford to take a week-long vacation in the middle of the campaign? Are you sure it's won't look funny to broadcast a half-hour ad in prime time on practically every network?

As the developments of the last 12 hours sink in, it's probably worth taking a moment to note that Obama and his team were sure. Every time the campaign implicitly said, "Trust us; we know what we're doing," it turns out, they really did.

And finally, from inside the echo chamber at the Corner, Kathryn Jean Lopez:
What freaks me out about this election is how oblivious to facts people have been. Everything about Obama's judgment and radicalism — whether Sean Hannity or Stanley Kurtz or Andy McCarthy etc. is telling you about it — was essentially deemed irrelevant (including largely by the McCain campaign, save for Palin eventually talking about Ayers). Abortion? Near no one outside a handful of conservatives were talking about his record on infanticide — beyond abortion. People are in for a rude awakening.

By Jeff Alworth Nov. 05, 2008