I see by most of the remarks here that you people just don’t get it. Obama was elected on his message of hope and change, and by the will of the 3 MILLION people that donated to his campaign. McCain lost because he offered nothing different than Bush regarding boosting the economy. While you people whined endlessly and futilely about Obama’s “socialist” redistribution plans, most Americans saw that that “redistribution” would be heading THEIR way (ideology is all fine and well friends, but self-interest trumps it most often.) As for Obama’s “friends” and so forth, McCain and the Republican attack machine simply didn’t make the case that somehow these people, some of whom Obama had a tenuous attachment to at best, would influence a President Obama.
Instead of bitterly rebuking Obama over the next 4 years may I suggest that you reorganize your own house. Ex Republican Congressman, and common sense Conservative thinker, Mickey Edwards (who indeed voted FOR Obama) suggests that Republicans reject the anti-intellectualism, and slash and burn elections strategy of Newt Gingrich, and Karl Rove, that has dominated the Conservative movement since the mid-90′s and become the party of Big Ideas again. You also need to become the “Big Tent Party” that John McCain had talked about in his saner years; out of 2300+ delegates at the Convention this year, 36 were black…I find this particularly interesting since reading that Blacks probably helped defeat proposition 8 in California; the facts are that minorities are socially very conservative, yet the Republican Party has not bothered themselves to go after this fresh source of support so invested are they in being the party of white people, and the affluent.
As my name suggests, I consider myself a centerist, and although I did support Obama I will be disappointed if he turns far left (in fact, after studying this man throughly, warts and all, since January, I am convinced that he will Govern from a place of moderation), I am above all interested in IDEAS, and I have been appalled as the other major political party in the Country became beholden to religious zealotry, pushed Joe Sixpackism at the price of intellectual discourse, and pushed out moderating voices; the party has become, as the recent vote suggests, a redux of the seccesionist South. This can’t be good for the movement, and you should be listening less to mindless rabble-rousers such as Hannity, Savage, and Limbaugh, and more to thoughtfull thinkers such as Bacevich, Phillips and Edwards. I also think that if the party takes an even harder right turn that you will remain mired in the waste-land of defeat as the country has NOT taken a turn left, we remain CENTER-right, but rather, has rejected the hard line politics of Karl Rove and his ilk.
