Two or three weeks before the election we saw 100,000 people go to see Barack in Missouri. One week before the election we saw 6,000 go to see McCain in Ohio; 4,000 of whom were children taken out of school and bussed in. So it didn't look to me as if there are people waiting on line for 2 or 3 hours to vote for John McCain and Sarah Palin.
Today, with a few votes left to be counted, Barack has received 65,070,495 out of 123,817,805 votes - 52.55%. McCain, 46.16% - a difference of 6.39%.
If Omaha has voted for Barack, he will receive 365 electoral votes to McCain's 173. If Omaha has voted for McCain Barack will receive 364 to McCain's 174. Regardless, Barack will receive 68% of the electoral vote.
The numbers spell Landslide and Liberal Mandate.
I have been comparing Obama and FDR - saying we need an FDR, and that Obama has the resolve and the intelligence to be as good a President as FDR. Franklin Delano Roosevelt won by landslides in '32 and '36. Herbert Hoover believed in rugged individualism and, in '32, that the philanthropy of the wealthy would solve the nation's ecomomic problems. He did not pull the USA out of the Depression. That was FDR, and he did it, in part, by creating the safety net and regulatory infrastructure that George W. Bush, and Ronald Reagan have dismantled. McCain, who called Obama "a socialist," also tried to equate Obama with Hoover. If he was correct, then Obama is a "free market socialist," a "capitalist socialist." But McCain was wrong on both counts. And it is John McCain whose ideals echo the failed policies of Hoover, along with his predecessors Warren G. Harding, and Calvin Coolidge.
Describing the Republican Administrations of Harding, Coolidge and Hoover, FDR said "the Nation looked to the government, and the government looked away" and "government by organized mob." This is what we have seen again during the last 8 years; both abroad in Iraq and at home in response to Katrina, in firing prosecutors, in wiretapping Americans, and in the "signing statements, and executive order with which George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney have governed by fiat. And they have not governed well. Maybe they meant well, but that's not good enough.
We need effective government. As Lincoln said, "government of the people, by the people, and for the people."