This why Barack Obama's victory in the Presidential election is now inevitable.
This is how I and many other people -- and the traditional media as well -- have had this whole thing wrong from the very beginning. The media (particularly the quietly and cynically McCain backing variety) has had it wrong, too. Only they won't wake up until after election day. This is how McCain has had his whole campaign wrong and why he is doomed to defeat.
I am just waking up, literally, and sometimes (ok, very very rarely) I have a waking epiphany (I'm still a bit groggy). In this epiphany I realize that my analysis of the country was wrong, has been wrong, that there was a wellspring of optimism and hope to tap into, and that Obama did tapped this wellspring brilliantly, and thus sidestepped his attackers and naysayers, left and right.
Today is one such day.
My epiphany comes with the vice presidential debates -- ironically one in which the mastermind is not even on stage.
I just realized that one of the crucial moments of the whole campaign came during the primaries. It came with a feint -- or, perhaps, a clue. Obama was widely panned for calling people in the south in general and Appalachia in particular "bitter" because they cling to "guns and religion".
Yes, this election has been about bitterness. But not about bitterness by itself. It's been about answering bitterness.
You see, in my view, the traditional media punditry are traditionally and unremittingly cynical. Obama realizes this also, and that this cynicism actually blinds them to what they actually face. And I am one of those people who is "bitter", but for very different reasons than guns and religion. I am an old liberal, one who realizes that to win, you must fight.
The public have been telegraphing their wishes the whole time, and to the degree Obama's victory is now inevitable, it is the degree to which McCain mistook the purpose of his selection as the Republican nominee for President. They didn't nominate him to seek the approval of the far right. They nominated him for the same reason Obama was nominated -- because the non-partisan public actually believed the image McCain has cultivated being a "maverick bipartisan". They wanted to see in McCain a sign that we could come together as Americans. And McCain took that message and picked up a wedge and a sledgehammer.
That's what cynicism (the right wing brand of it, anyway) does.
But, for McCain, these things -- bipartisanship, maverick, et. al. are slogans. He has badly miscued the mood of the public and the reason for his victory over his Republican rivals.
But, let me be fair to myself -- I am bitter because I've seen the cynical traditional media and the traditional cynical Republican wreak the death of dreams for decades. Or perhaps, if I am to believe Barack Obama, merely the abeyance of those dreams for a time that coincidentally spans a large section of my young adult life.
But youth and idealistic hope forgets these defeats. Among Obama's visceral followers, the bitter taste of defeat is either not there or is washed clean.
And ironically, Obama will have fooled all of us old bitter people spoling for a fight because none of us could believe he actually meant exactly what he said -- or if we did believe, that it was possible to win that way. And that, by so saying, he could tap into a wellspring of something the bitter (acknowledged and otherwise) and cynical (acknowledged and otherwise) could scarcely credit was there to be tapped in the first place.
So Obama's victory is sealed in a hundred little moments.
It is sealed when the traditional media plays the "angry black man" card on Obama.
His victory was sealed when the anti-Obama forces of the tradmed and the Republicans played the Farrakhan card and the New Yorker puts up a cover with Michelle wearing an AK-47 over her shoulder.
His victory was sealed when he crossed the aisle to shake McCain's hand, and McCain was non-plussed and hostile.
His victory is sealed in his campaign motto, "Yes we can" -- a motto I have had custom printed, by the way, on my toilet paper, since June. (No, not really, just metaphorically).
His victory is sealed in the Republicans being deluded -- I would say "tricked" into attacking those very things that seal Obama's victory -- his people positivism. They even attacked him for being a "community organizer"! Worst possible move.
So, as is the case with unconscious epiphanies, I am left to wonder why this epiphany came home to me in one event in which Obama wasn't even personally present.
Ironically, I believe that Palin and Biden actually "get it" and the grounds of this VP debate was fought on the battleground Obama actually laid out -- while the punditry and the analysis surrounding the debate did not and do not get it.
You see, it's not just that Palin is popular with the right wing base. It is that in the debate, she, too, is attempting to draw on this wellspring of optimism and hope Obama sees, only a right wing version of it. Oh, but it helps Obama that she is lying from one side and down the other. McCain saw, though, perhaps, in Palin something he himself could not attain. And, I don't think either of them could articulate this realization even if you prompted them. In her attacks on Biden, that spectacularly backfire, she sees something, perhaps at a lizard base level, we could hardly credit to her higher neocortex.
To attain this pinnacle, to tap this wellspring of hope and idealism and optimism, you have to have things that Palin does not have. For one reason, you have to be non two-faced. You have to have a history that suggests you are genuine, and not be so cynical as to think the American public's memory is two seconds long.
And so, mea culpa. I have been wrong this whole time. I owe Barack Obama, and some of his supporters who have argued on this blog for his strategy, an apology. And so, I apologize for thinking Obama weak.
And I am glad that although I may be so slow as to not realize this until a month before the election, the media and the Republicans are slow enough that they won't get it until the election is over and Obama has won.
I am still right, though, about what comes after the election. Ha! But that's perhaps a subject for futher diaries.