If polls hold up, Barack Obama is going to win by a pretty significant margin. While I have a lot of reservations about an Obama administration, and while I completely reject the religion of presidentialism, I'm nonetheless pretty damn psyched about the prospects of him winning for reasons that go way beyond being happy that John McCain isn't in the Oval Office. We all have our reasons for pulling for Obama - here are three of mine (many of which I have written about over the last year):
- Obama is a person who carries with him almost every major cultural attribute - African American heritage, inner-city roots, generally liberal voting record - that the conservative movement has demonized for at least a generation, if not more. If he wins, it will be a major step forward in America rejecting that demonization, and saying it is unacceptable.
- While he has been squishy on some important issues like FISA and NAFTA, and while he has been straight-up awful on other issues like the bailout, he hasn't really triangulated against the progressive movement in any kind of structural way. That is, he hasn't made an attack on progressives a centerpiece of a strategy to prove or validate his "independence" in the sort of "Look at how bipartisan I am by kicking progressives in the face!" kind of way. Sure, the times make it easier to avoid that kind of triangulation, but there were opportunities for him to triangulate, and he hasn't in the way that other Democratic politicians would have. If he wins without that kind of triangulation, it throws out the standard DLC model claiming the only way to win elections is to dis America's progressive majority.
- Whether he wanted to or not - and I suspect he did - he will win with a mandate for real, far-reaching change. The huge numbers of new voters brought into the process are going to be expecting - even demanding - substantive change, not half-measures from an Obama administration. So even if Obama himself wants to move slowly or incrementally, there's a big potential that he's going to have a pressure system pushing him harder (I say "potential" because it remains to be seen whether progressive organizations are ready to do the tough post-election work of building that mandate into a social movement - a big if in the age of Partisan War Syndrome).
Again, Obama isn't perfect - far from it. But he also isn't John McCain - and more importantly, he has the potential to not be an incrementalist triangulator like Bill Clinton, either. If he wins, the victory will be both a big achievement unto itself and a rare moment of opportunity for lasting change.
P.S. I am not overconfident at all here - I still think there's a very real chance Obama could lose. I (obviously) hope that doesn't happen.