Four more years!

Now Florida has been sorted out (and awarded to Barack Obama at that), one can give a full assessment .  No scrub that – a half-arsed collection of thoughts, but hey, it’s my blog and there are no rules.

Despite Obama’s crushing electoral win, many Republicans are not taking it with good, if disappointed, grace, revealing themselves to be the nasty, bitter, small-minded individuals that they are.  The Democrats would have had a heavy weight on their hearts but resign themselves to the fact of the matter had Obama not gathered enough states with big populations together.   Hours after the result was called, right-wing pundits were babbling that the president has no second term mandate because of his narrow popular majority vote.  Sorry, I don’t believe it says in the constitution that the winning candidate has to triumph by more than ten percentage points to make their election valid.  What Obama has behind him is the trend of history, where the Dems have one the popular vote for the presidency every time, bar one, since 1992, a veritable hegemony comparable to the days of FDR and Truman, while if the Supreme Court hadn’t stopped the recount in Florida in 2000, President Al Gore would probably have been garnered the same in 2004.  Indeed, the Republicans didn’t raise this issue in 2000, when Gore won the popular vote.

But hypocrisy is the hallmark of the modern Republican Party.  They criticise Obama for not being bipartisan yet sit with their arms folded, making no attempt themselves.  Indeed, many Republicans in Congress were elected to make no compromise at all - if ‘politics is the art of compromise’, they are the kids who throw the paint on the floor, ruining things for everyone.  That Obama does not need to face an election again, he can play hard ball to expose the fanatics for what they are.  Or he can be emollient to try and peel off moderate House Republicans, though this proved in vain last time with 2010’s intake.  Congressional Republicans operate pettiness in inverse proportion to Mitt Romney’s gracious concession.

Norman Ornsteim summed it up perfectly – both sides have ‘coagulated’ into parliamentary parties but are still organised in a caucus rather than a parliamentary system.  Therefore, the checks and balances have seized up the machine (though small government partisans say, ludicrously, that was their aim).  It’s perfectly reasonable to actively oppose the other side if that side controls both executive and legislature and can be ejected from both at the same time every four or five years.  At the moment, it is a touch schizophrenic.

Even though the Senate remained in Democrat hands for at least another two years, Obama can feel confident in locking in the gains of the first term, such as financial reform, ending anti-gay restrictions in the army and, above all, keeping Obamacare (whose results will grow exponentially, as the main effects were scheduled to kick in from 2013).  He’ll let the tax cuts for the super-rich expire and achieve incremental domestic change, most likely hammering out a deal on immigration policy, while going big on getting a signature foreign policy legacy, probably on the Israel/Palestine issue, to justify that premature Nobel Peace Prize.  When you hear sorrowful Republicans lamenting that their country is becoming communist (first, no, it’s not and second, you don’t know what you’re talking about and probably never have been to a country that endured the yoke of communism with its ravages), this is the demagoguery-inflected ignorance with which Obama has to contend.

There are abundant ironies in the political system of the USA.  If either party was serious about ending the gridlock in Congress, they would need a super-majority in the Senate to end the concept of Super-majorities blocking filibusters, as the other side would say that their opponents are doing it to enhance respective political power.  Also, ironic is that the electoral college, allegedly designed to protect the influence of small, rural states from the big metropolitan dominated states, shafted the former and has done so two presidential elections in a row.  Karl Rove was completely outmanoeuvred by David Plouffe and David Axelrod.

The BBC’s coverage was sober and professional in contrast to its chaotic 2008 performance but the time whizzed by (partly due to myself doing other things, like loading up the dishwasher, filling the washing machine, setting both into action, having a shave, etc).  Amusingly, Niles Gardiner, a Romney aide, who in the aftermath of defeat became merely a ‘foreign policy expert’ (?!?) was asked to say one nice thing about Obama and you could see his brain struggling with such an outside-of-the-envelope concept for himself.  So far beyond the realms of his intellect, he failed and fell back into a default mode of attacking Obama (and praising George W Bush in the same breath – insane) – thank goodness he is nowhere near real power.  Simon Schama did put in an appearance but was only used as a warm-down act.