The Day After: What this Means

The Op-Ed columns won't shut up about race and the "historic" nature of this election. On the flipside, there are others who also think this is about race: white liberal guilt. Both groups are missing the point. We elected the guy who taught Constitutional Law at Harvard for four years, who happens to have an ethnically mixed geneology. Ultimately, it means that the incumbent party has been defeated, ending eight years of corruption, torture, cronyism, and constitutional usurpations. Those things are not inherent in the Republican Party, only in how it came to define itself under a Bush Presidency--and thanks, in no small part, to the elusive Dick Cheney.

Nowhere was this more apparent than in the candidacy of Senator John McCain. The primary candidate who won nomination by exciting the middle became convinced that he could not win without securing the base; the Bush base. We kept seeing the real maverick peering out over the arcane machinery installed by Karl Rove, which has, unfortunately, come to define the Republican Party. The galant concession of our noble warrior was eclipsed by the bitterness of his "supporters," who offered their candidate only muted applause, heckled him and booed every mention of the Democratic contender, while cheering McCain's running mate as though she had won. It was evidence of a bitter divide--not between white and black, but between two sides of a social construct: left and right, liberal and conservative, Democrat and Republican.

Remembering Senator McCain's RNC acceptance speech, he admonished his party toward their better instincts, saying, "I fight to restore the pride and principles of our party: we were elected to change Washington and we let Washington change us. . . . We lost the trust of the American people when some Republicans gave into the temptation of corruption. . . . We lost their trust when we valued our party over our principles. We're going to change that." This was the maverick we'd heard about. We saw him again at a rally, battling the the lies propagated by his own campaign, correcting a woman who blurted out, "He's [Obama] a Arab." Sadly, it was those rare glimpses when we saw McCain, the reformer, that we also saw his attempts at reform summarily rejected by the Republican base, a base whose identity has them locked in to the ideological struggles of the past, which occurs in the social construct of dichotomy, where every issue can somehow be categorized as liberal or conservative.

Are Newton's Laws of Motion liberal or conservative laws? It's a silly question, since laws of physics aren't filtered through a paradigm, they simply are. So why should existing solutions be any different? If we break a steel rod in half, do we reconnect it with a conservative or a liberal weld? So how do we fix our broken economy? What if "conservative" ideas won't work right now? If a liberal idea does work, does it mean that all conservative ideas are wrong forever?

Sound off.