I am writing today to announce the closure of the New Mexico Independent. After three and a half years of operation in New Mexico, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news…
While environmental activists played their part yesterday during demonstrations at the capitol building, going so far as to dress up as solar panels and to sing the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” their counterparts, the anti-cap-and-trade contingency who has…
Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.
As the the stats keep pouring in from Tuesday’s election, I’m obsessively surfing the wave of demographic data and discovering that a lot of what I suspected might happen on Election Day actually did.
I thought that voters would ultimately care less about partisan lines and more about the actual issues affecting their lives.
States like Virginia and Indiana, who haven’t voted for a Democratic candidate for president in 40 years, flipped and went for Barack Obama. Over and over, the statistics show, Republicans and Independents crossed partisan lines and voted Democratic for president.
I suspected that race wasn’t going to be a dealbreaker in this election.
It wasn’t.
Obama was elected by a multicultural majority that included people of all colors, ages and classes, White, Latino, Jewish, urban, suburban and rural, played a huge part in his victory.
I hoped that what looked to be record engagement in the civic process for months before the election would actually turn into action on Election Day.
It did.
Tuesday’s turnout smashed previous records, as an unprecedented 131 million people cast their votes for president.
Above all, I prayed that Americans would remember, or maybe realize for the first time, that that the right to vote was their own personal key to shaping America into the kind of country they wanted it to be.
And they did.
Tuesday’s record turnout and stunning vote for change happened because Americans were fed up with their country’s decline and used their most elemental civic weapon – their vote - to begin the long, hard process of reversing it.
Barack Obama’s landslide win Tuesday was not about millions of naive Americans being soothed, beguiled and led (astray) by a messianic figure who promised that everything would be all right.
It was about voters assessing the damage to their beloved country and making a pragmatic judgment about who could best help them repair it. This column by Washington Post political writer E.J. Dionne says it best, I think.
Our country’s stunning economic collapse over the last month was the crisis that trumped everything else voters had thrust in their faces this long election season.
I believe that it, more than anything else, showed Americans the folly of racism and partisan politics and pushed us toward the urgency of finding the person most likely to lead us back to stability.
But the domestic economic crisis was just the most dramatic thing. We’ve got plenty else to worry about. Throw in our ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, our crippling dependence on foreign oil, and our battered standing abroad, and it’s pretty damn daunting.
Daunting enough that voters were ready to make the leap to a man who, in other times, may have seemed a bit thin on presidential-type experience. (For a satirical take on this, go here,
but not if you are easily offended).
But the millions of voters who elected Obama were apparently willing to focus more on what he does have – intelligence, curiosity, a willingness to draw and learn from the experience of others – than on the executive experience he does not.
And then there are Obama’s extraordinary abilities to speak and conceive and inspire people, to LEAD THEM to believe in the best about themselves – and about their country.
God knows we are going to need a superhuman leader to get us through the seriously dark days ahead.
As I watched a steely Obama speak on election night at Grant Park in Chicago, I became convinced that he knows it too. I saw the gravity in his face. I saw it in his whole body. It was as if the aging, maturing process that usually takes at least one year to affect a new president happened in one hour.
So I hope Americans can do what John McCain asked them to do for our new president in his classy concession speech earlier that night in Arizona.
“I urge all Americans who supported me to join me in not just congratulating him, but offering our next president our good will and earnest effort to find ways to come together to find the necessary compromises to bridge our differences and help restore our prosperity, defend our security in a dangerous world, and leave our children and grandchildren a stronger, better country than we inherited,” said McCain.
“I call on all Americans, as I have often in this campaign, to not despair of our present difficulties, but to believe, always, in the promise and greatness of America, because nothing is inevitable here. Americans never quit. We never surrender. We never hide from history. We make history.”
