Guest: Tom Scheck

58 D (56 D + 1 I + 1 ID) | 1 Runoff | 1 R leads | 40 R

Guest: Libby Casey

This post also appears on Kevin Rennie’s Labor View from Bayside. Rennie blogs from Australia.

A post for Voices without Votes:

Australian bloggers found their voices after being glued to the media or live-blogging the election for most of Wednesday our time.

Man of Lettuce, Sydney taxi driver and author of Cablog, joined work and pleasure as usual on election night:

Last night the City was awash with the intoxicating ambience of Barack Obama’s victory. An earlier invitation to the Democrats Abroad celebration party on Oxford Street had alerted me to a premier content source…sheer exhilaration plus alcohol - perfect.

His account of an encounter in his cab with an African American couple should be read in full on his unique blog. He finishes on his own note of hope:

…Let’s pray he can fulfil this vision and unify all Americans, thereby becoming one of their great Presidents.
O-ba-ma

An Onymous Lefty, Jeremy, raised a sour note. Known for his sarcastic posts, he put that aside to express his disgust at the California vote against gay marriage in straightforward language:

…the fact that many of his voters (he won California, after all) turned out to take this basic civil right away from gay people seriously tarnishes his victory. It implies that had he been more principled, and really stood for civil rights - and asked his voters to genuinely consider why, at a moment of the triumph of African Americans as a previously-persecuted group, they would even consider turning that persecution on others - then the gay people of California would not have just lost theirs.

I stand by my earlier refusal to get too excited by the election result.

Obama refuses to stand up for civil rights; Californians lose theirs

Mark Bahnisch at Larvatus Prodeo looked at the impact of the web on the elections and possible future directions:

No doubt one of the big stories about the US election will be the influence of the blogosphere and the netroots. In many ways, the rise of the intertubes in politics was an unintended consequence of the Rove approach to politics…

All technology is shaped socially. Blogging, YouTube, and other social media have been enablers and not just causes of this invigoration of democracy. I’d like to see some research and analysis focused on the wellsprings of activism we’ve seen bubbling up. I think that would be, in many ways, a more productive frame through which to look at what’s interesting, distinctive and exciting about this campaign than yet another round of “journos v. bloggers” style articles.

US election: Yes we can!

Andrew Bolt has been posted on Voices without Votes before. He is a daily newspaper columnist with Melbourne’s Herald Sun and media spokesperson for the right wing in Australia. He is a climate change denier, a critic of anything progressive (the dreaded left-wing, latte and chardonnay drinking socialists) and has “issues” with race.

Just before conceding Obama’s win yesterday, his blog featured a video clip outside a polling booth with the following comments:

Should McCain win, against all predictions and the polls, there will be trouble:

Toledo police are gearing up for possible “civil unrest” during and after tomorrow’s elections.

Indeed, the menace outside one polling booth, patrolled by Black Panthers, is palpable

Obama or McCain. UPDATE: It’s Obama

The old politics of fear and prejudice still live with us. Judge for yourself.

Finally, Miriam Lyons, from the Centre for Policy Development, also shared her thoughts on the Obama presidency at Larvatus Prodeo:

Today’s election result heralds the rise of Green Keynesianism. The US economy is in the toilet and smart economists are advocating direct investment over a more consumer-based fiscal stimulus.

The Obama campaign’s target for emissions cuts was 80% by 2050 - a fair way ahead of Oz Labor’s as-yet-unaltered election promise of 60% by 2050. With the Arctic ice-sheet melting rapidly even an 80% target is too low for a developed country like the US, but it should certainly give Professor Ross Garnaut reason to revise his pessimism about the likely outcome of the Copenhagen round of climate negotiations. It’s worth noting that the Obama campaign’s climate and energy platform specifically called for 100% auctioning of permits.

This is serious stuff. Miriam also reflected on possible impacts on Australia by Obama’s approach to war, economics and international relations. As a think-tank person herself, it was no surprise that she concluded with their likely role in the Obama era:

Just as an aside, it will be interesting to follow the relationship between progressive think tanks & the new administration. Expect to see the traditional influx from conservative think tanks to Republican administrations mirrored on the Democrat side this time around.

Guest Post by Miriam Lyons: What does an Obama win mean for Australia?

If George W. Bush represents the Dark Ages in terms of intellectual progress and political awareness, Barack Obama seems squarely planted in the Enlightenment.

This post also appears on Chantal Laurent’s The Haitian Blogger. Laurent blogs from Haiti.

Ralph Nader in effect called Barack Obama an “Uncle Tom”. Nader said that it was Obama’s choice so far to be an Uncle Tom to the giant corporations. Ralph was a bad boy. He should apologize immediately.

But if he doesn’t, so what? It’s Ralph’s thing to “rage against the machine.” He’s an activist gadfly for consumer protection. No one should expect Nader to give that up; though he should be more circumspect and respectful to President-Elect Obama. Obama has not even stepped into the oval office or sworn on the bible to uphold the constitution, unlike Bush, who should be the target of Nader’s vitriol because of the full mess he’s made of this country. Nader has lost control of his facial muscles and twitches and squints throughout the whole interview. I hope he gets it together. I want to still have some respect for him.

But the fact is, Barack Obama has suddenly become as establishment as you can get, and it stands to reason that many people will align against him. Who knows, if he continues to do the things that Nader outlined (he is a politician!), I might get in that long line.

I don’t think Obama is going to be too offended–he will just brush off racial attacks by people like Nader, Berlusconi and that racist Austrian pundit or any others that have the balls to speak their bigoted, prejudicial or racist ideology–it’s not acceptable to do so and it’s progress that they will get plenty of criticism (even from unexpected quarters!)… IT’S THE PEOPLE THAT YOU DON’T HEAR FROM, THAT LET THEIR HATE SPEAK OUT THROUGH THE BARREL OF A GUN OR OTHER WEAPON WHO ARE DEADLY.

I don’t know if this rumor is rooted in truth (see the links below; it’s true), but I heard a caller to WBAI’s Hugh Hamilton show voice the concern that many White people went out and brought guns after Obama won the Democratic nomination and even more armed themselves when Obama won the presidency. It is ironic that many of the guns purchased will most likely not protect or secure these folks, but may end up facilitating domestic violence, crime or a tragic accident.

Of course FOX “twilight zone” NEWS would jump on Ralph Nader for this – you know “Divisiveness R’ US” is their unofficial motto. Surely, these propagandist, racist, ignorant buffoons have said much, much worst against Barack Obama in particular and Black people in general. I’m certainly not buying the bridge they are trying to sell with their feigned outrage over Ralph’s misguided remarks.

On a positive note, the Obama administration is set to recognize science… first thing will be to reverse the Bush policy on prohibiting stem cell research. Yeah!

I can’t find it, but I also wanted to put up a chart from the new change.gov website that was displayed on Keith Obermann that has all the branches of the government listed UNDER the constitution. Hey, that’s CHANGE I CAN BELIEVE IN!

By the way; can Bush pardon himself?

Further Reading:
On Concerns Over Gun Control, Gun Sales Are Up
“Sales of handguns, rifles and ammunition have surged in the last week, according to gun store owners around the nation…”

Gun sales up in N.C. after Obama win

Guns Sales are up ten billion percent

Gun Sales Up Before Election

57 D (55 D + 1 I + 1 ID) | 1 D leads | 1 Runoff | 1 R leads | 40 R

Read and listen to more about the close races in the Senate »

Guest: Susanna Capelouto

Our partner, the New York Times, has taken some of the details from the 2008 elections and made an illuminating map. Done poorly, comparing demographic shifts between election years could be a very dry exercise, but the map above illustrates things very clearly. Check it out!

Guests: Jeff Zeleny and Sudeep Reddy

Guest: Gary Sick

Guest: Drew Westen

Guest: Barnett Rubin

Senator Joe Lieberman, ID-Conn., has retained his position as chair of the Homeland Security Committee, but he continues to rile Democrats for his endorsement of Republican presidential candidate John McCain and his sharp criticism of Democratic candidate Barack Obama in a speech at the RNC this past September. Lieberman has continuing caucusing with the Democrats ever since officially becoming an “Independent Democrat,” but is under no compulsion to continue doing so.

Current U.S. Senate party affiliation numbers

» 11/7: The polls were wrong in Alaska, and Sen. Ted Stevens remains in political limbo
» 11/6: Democrats are on a political high with most elections (mostly) decided
» 11/6: Vote counting continues in Georgia and elsewhere
» 11/5: Alaska Senate race still undecided
» 11/5: North Carolina’s Senate race radically changed
» 11/5: AP calls Minnesota Senate race
» 11/5: The other contests

Guest: Paddy O’Connell

“Overwhelmingly, most feel that the new president-elect and his family should adopt a pound mutt.” — Meg Frost, author of the blog Cute Overload. She’s been polling her readers on the question of what dog best represents America.

Guest: Marci Alboher

“If Emanuel doesn’t accept, it makes Obama look like a chump.” — Politico.com’s David Mark, on President-elect Barack Obama asking Rep. Rahm Emanuel, D-Ill., to be his chief of staff

But a map like that seems somehow wrong. Wyoming (population 515,000) takes up a lot more space on that map than, say, Delaware (population 853,00), or Manhattan (population 1,620,000). The map shows acreage; elections are based on vote totals.

So Mark Newman, physics professor at the University of Michigan, takes the county-by-county vote totals per party, and then expands or shrinks the county based on how many votes were cast there. Chicago’s Cook County, in the center of the map below, winds up dwarfing all 22 counties in Wyoming, simply based on its population.

He then goes one step farther, assigning each resized county a color shade on the spectrum between red and blue based on the proportion of Democrats and Republicans who voted.

The resulting maps may look a little odd at first, but professor Newman explains them well on his Web site. And given our nation’s history — you may recall a minor tiff called the American Civil War — it’s comforting to see that nobody in this country lives in a state that’s all-red or all-blue. (Washington, D.C., isn’t a state, last time I checked.)

(The Takeaway has made our own attempts to break up the Electoral College map. See: The Takeaway’s Electoral College prediction tracker and The Christian Science Monitor’s Patchwork Nation project.)

November 4th, 2008, Sen. Barack Obama was elected president of the United States. All night, people honked their carks, hugged each other with tears of joy, and celebrated Obama’s victory in New York City. People scrambled to attain and preserve souvenirs of America’s victory in the form of flyers, “I voted today” stickers, and newspapers that announced the Democratic ticket’s big win. Because Obama’s victory of becoming the first African-American U.S. president made headline news the day after the election, newspapers became scarce and a precious possession. By 10:30 a.m. the next morning, the New York Times was sold out in downtown Manhattan.

There was no one way in which people reacted. Every voice and expectation of Obama’s presidency is different. However, the majority of Americans understand that he has a difficult road ahead of him. People believe that their demands and concerns are more likely to be heard and acknowledged under his new administration.

Obama broke racial barriers with the support of the American people. It is incredible to witness Obama becoming the first black president when 200 years ago the United States enforced slavery. Slow change has occurred in the U.S., starting with the Emancipation Proclamation that freed slaves, the civil rights movement, Brown vs. Board of Education, which declared that “separate but equal” is not constitutional, and now, Obama’s win indeed is a great historical accomplishment. The American people should witness Obama’s success as a stepping stone for new leadership and progress among minorities living in the U.S. His presidency in the White House symbolizes change and possibility.

Obama’s win did not erase the vivid racism, discrimination, and xenophobia that prevent American justice, freedom, and equality to prevail. Inequality is prevalent among people of different races, sexes, and classes in America. However, Obama challenged and overcame racial barriers that prevented past minority candidates from taking leadership in the U.S. presidential office. His commitment inspires not only minorities but all people to become more diplomatic, respectful, and determined to achieve greatness with consciousness. —Alejandra Lopez, Pace University

Alejandra Lopez is a junior in Political Science at Pace University in New York City.

Click on the sounds below and view photos above from Times Square, New York City, on election night.

Here are some of the highlights — the 15-minute conversation is here and below.

“It’s almost like he’s a god-made man for this moment. He’s got an African father, but he’s had none of the black suffering or experience we had in the south or the big cities of the north. He was given a different kind of childhood in Hawaii, but also in Indonesia, with a Chinese step-father and surrounded by Chinese Muslims. And so he’s grown up almost with a global, cultural DNA.”

Symbols:

“You cannot eat symbols. And nothing tastes worse than a symbolism that doesn’t fill a need. I shy away from all the symbols. Because now we’ve got to deliver. Now, I think we can.”

Obama, the past and the future:

“I have never met anybody better prepared. I thought that Clinton was a brilliant young man. I know that Jimmy Carter was the smartest people I’ve known. John Kennedy. But I haven’t seen anybody as calm, as cool, as collected, and as disciplined and organized in his ability — Jimmy Carter was personally disciplined. But he couldn’t organize the people around him. This has been an almost flawless campaign. If he can run a government or end a war with the same efficiency that he has run this campaign, we’re on the path for glory.”

What’s ahead:

“There’s a $700 billion bill to start with. There’s maybe as much as a three trillion dollar deficit he’s got to deal with, so the celebration can’t last long.”

Andrew Young and Adaora Udoji

(THOMAS LOHNES/AFP/Getty Images)

Guests: Andrea Bernstein, Marcus Mabry and Todd Zwillich

(Anthony Jacobs/Getty Images)

Guest: Jerry Kellman

Guest: Harris Wofford