The Obama Post
What’s the most important thing to you about last night’s election result? To you, individually, what’s the most important thing? What put that spring in your step this morning? What kept you up until 3.30 am, watching the results roll in and afterwards sleeping the soundest 4 hours you have in a long time? What was it that made you smile a little broader at the person who served you your coffee on your way to work? And what is it that now has you pouring over the newspapers and websites that all confirm something that your barely allowed yourself to believe?
There’s no doubt that Barack Obama is an incredible orator and his ability to make the hairs stand up on the back of your neck is a gift bestowed on few, especially politicians in the modern age. As Europeans (a more relevant context than Irish, considering the impact such a result has on the world) I think most people were convinced that he was the right choice for the American people to make. And as Europeans, we tend to have this somewhat patronising attitude towards the American electorate, feeling that we know what’s best for the world as a whole. The fact of the matter is that Americans, like every other citizen of every other democratised country on this earth, vote for a candidate based on domestic issues, not a wider world view. I’m not saying that foreign policy is an irrelevance, it’s just that it’s the effect that a country’s foreign policy has on domestic issues that’s important to the electorate, or at least more important than the wider consequences. And why should it be any different?
To me, the most important thing about last night is that it brings us one step closer to the immanent departure of the incumbent administration, and I say that as a European as well as an individual. The last 8 years of Bush, Chaney and Rice has been a fairly miserable experience for everyone, American citizens included. I think we Europeans were much less inclined to separate John McCain from that administration than the American electorate were, especially after his questionable choice of running mate which succeeded only in reinforcing a Republican stereotype in our left of centre minds. Perhaps if he had not chosen Palin we would be looking at a different result today, and perhaps that may not have been a bad thing. I believe John McCain to be a good man, and I believe he was sincere in his wish to turn America away from the route it had adopted under Bush. But the fact remains, not one of us was comfortable in the knowledge that we were a 72 year old’s heart beat away from that remnant of neoconservatism taking the highest office in the free world.
So was Obama’s victory a good thing? Yes, absolutely and without doubt, for both America and the rest of the world. But remembering that I say that as a left-leaning, bleeding-heart liberal, was it as much of an open and shut case as we had it in our minds? I’m not so sure. I long for this presidency to deliver everything that we were hoping for and that it does not turn into the sort of disappointment that Jimmy Carter’s election in ‘77 did. But there is no doubt, outside of what happens from this point forth, that there has been a sea change in American attitudes towards what can be considered and eligible candidate for the presidency. Obama’s victory speech was as spine tingling as ever, but perhaps John McCain’s was more telling as a representation of how far America has come on the race issue. He accepted the result with good grace and humility and seemed proud that the country he lives in could elect a man regardless of race, rather than as a consequence of. As Europeans, we can no longer look down our noses and trump out the tired old cliches that America is inherently and institutionally biased in favor of the white Anglo-Saxon male, supported by a red-necked & ignorant majority. The fact now remains that America has proved itself to be the least racist country in the western world, and that we have some catching up to do.
Good for them.
