The Obama Revolution

By John Parisella - Saturday, November 8, 2008 at 6:20 PM - 23 Comments

‘Revolution’ may be too strong a word for many. After all, this election was about change and, every four or eight years, we hear about the necessity of it. Besides, Barack Obama has given every indication that he is a moderate, pragmatic and prudent politician. His cool temperament was on display both the night of his victory and two days later when, surrounded by his economic transition team, he displayed the very methodical approach to problem solving that is emerging as his managerial style. His appointment of Rahm Emmanuel, himself a smart and promising politician, is hardly the stuff of revolution. And yet, when you examine how Obama won and how he conducted himself,you know politics as practiced in the past 40 years is in for transformational change.

His elaborate and sophisticated use of the Internet, the power of the words he delivered in a truly inspirational tone, and the appeal to unity and the better nature of mankind is something that we have not seen since Bobby Kennedy spoke in Indianapolis the day Martin Luther King was killed. Back then, we expected politics to be a force for change and progress in the noble sense of the word. In those days, the rhetoric was uplifting and appealed to the idealism of the young. Aging baby boomers remain nostalgic about those heady days of transformational change. Continue…

Dear Mr. Obama

By Alex Shimo - Friday, November 7, 2008 at 3:01 PM - 1 Comment

In one of his election promises, Obama said he would implement a cap-and-trade policy on emissions. This can be an efficient way of cutting carbon, but it can also lead to real problems, depending on the details of how it is done. If Obama is really going to implement a cap and trade policy, he should learn from Europe’s mistakes. Continue…

"It's always darkest just before it goes totally black" — actual McCain quote

By Andrew Coyne - Thursday, November 6, 2008 at 5:15 PM - 51 Comments

Each of us has two countries: our own and America. When America has an election, it is as much the whole world’s, or nearly so, for America is our laboratory, the place where all our hopes and ideals about democracy are put on trial, and as such we all have a direct stake in the outcome — not just because of what it might mean for American foreign policy or Canada-US relations, but because we are all invested in the United States: intellectually, emotionally, spiritually.

I spent election night — the American one I mean — in the company of about a thousand conservatives, or I imagine they were: it was the Albany Club, after all. And yet the applause was sincere, if not deafening, when it was announced that Barack Obama — the Most Liberal Senator Ever — was the victor. Such is the historic nature of his candidacy, but also the transcendent appeal of his personality. We will see if he is truly post-partisan, but he is certainly cross-partisan.

Still, it can’t have been a happy night for Republicans, or conservatives, all in all. So, to cheer up my right-wing friends, here are a few straws they can clutch at:

1) It was closer than it looked. There was a reason McCain stumped till the end, notwithstanding all those national polls showing Obama with a 6 or 8 or 10 point lead: because national polls don’t mean squat. It’s the electoral college that counts, and had a couple more pieces fallen into place, McCain might have squeaked out a win.

The race essentially turned on a handful of states: Florida, Ohio, Indiana, North Carolina, Virginia, Colorado and Iowa. All were Bush states in 04, all went Obama this time. But not by much: the average margin of victory in those states was about four percentage points, meaning a two percentage point swing would have given them, and their 102 electoral college votes, to McCain — enough to put him in the White House. Continue…

What kind of exchange? Warm!

By Paul Wells - Thursday, November 6, 2008 at 4:35 PM - 19 Comments

Emailed to Ottawa reporters a minute ago:

Read-out of Call between Prime Minister Harper and President-elect Obama

On Thursday November 6, Prime Minister Stephen Harper spoke to President-elect Obama to congratulate him on winning the US Presidential election.

In a warm exchange, the two leaders emphasized that there could be no closer friends and allies and vowed to maintain and further build upon this strong relationship.

They touched on the G20 Leaders’ Summit in Washington on November 15, 2008 and its importance for addressing the global financial crisis.

The Prime Minister and the President-elect agreed to talk again in the near future.

Why we don't need an Obama

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, November 6, 2008 at 4:33 PM - 3 Comments

As explained by Glen Pearson (he of this fame/infamy).

“It’s my belief that we don’t require a transformation figure, much as we’d like to have one. But what we do require is a kind of inclusive individual whose very words and thoughts transcend our present regionalism, or crippling moral failure towards the less-fortunate, and who can reconcile us with the planet. We are presently on a course that pits one voter group against another and plays regions of the country against one another, and we are the poorer for it. We require some who, like the new president-elect, can call on the best that is non-partisan in each of us and can summon us to a greater national identity through the massive challenges we face at present and the remarkable resources that have assisted us in overcoming great difficulties in our history. We need someone who will make Parliament work, will look at the opposition parties and say You’ve got a point and you hold it dearly. In fact, so do we as a party. But we’ve so much argued ourselves to the ground that we have precious little energy left to give to those people that actually elected us in the first place. Let’s make their needs our primary goal. Let’s find what we share in common and at least give them that. And then perhaps we can find compromise on the rest. This is the kind of leader Canada requires right now but he or she hasn’t arrived yet. When that person does appear, this country won’t be so much transformed as reconciled and functioning like an advanced citizenry. I have full belief that the great wells of institutional depth and intelligence in Canada will bring just such an individual to light. We don’t need transformation, just a inspired view of values once shared but now forgotten as we head of in all directions. That time couldn’t come too soon.”

Farewell to Gitmo

By selley - Thursday, November 6, 2008 at 4:20 PM - 11 Comments

Further to this post, in which I expressed grave doubts that Obama’s America—however superior it will turn out to be than the Americas that preceded it—will convince Canadians of their neighbour’s overall benevolent nature, the New York Times has a sobering article on the topic of closing Guantanamo. (They also have incredibly detailed dossiers on all current and former detainees.)

Resident at the prison camp, according to the Times investigation, are:

-Men who were allegedly, at one time, potential 9/11 hijackers.

-Sixteen men “accused of some of the most significant terrorist attacks in the last decade, including the 1998 bombings at American Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the 2000 attack on the destroyer Cole in Yemen, and the Sept. 11 attacks.

-Twenty men accused of being Osama bin Laden’s “bodyguards.”

-And, perhaps most tellingly, “more than 60″ men who have been cleared for release or transfer, according to the Pentagon, but remain at Guantánamo because of difficulties negotiating transfer agreements between the United States and other countries.”

It’s unclear what Washington can do with some of these people even if it finds them innocent, in other words.

So, what to do? Continue…

Megapundit: And suddenly, Stockwell Day makes sense

By selley - Thursday, November 6, 2008 at 2:07 PM - 1 Comment

Must-reads: Don Macpherson on the Quebec election.

The day after the morning after
Audacity of hope, please meet the $455-billion deficit.

The Toronto Star’s Bob Hepburn elevates himself from the merely inimitable to the almost unbelievable by painting a portrait of an America that, despite having just elected its first black president, has achieved basically nothing in the field of race relations. A white Democratic candidate might well have done better, he suggests, and there will apparently be “55 million Americans who voted against [Barack] Obama … watching for him to stumble.” When he does, Hepburn predicts, many white people, such as an idiot friend of his who couldn’t decide on Tuesday whether she could bring herself to vote for a Muslim, “will be saying smugly to their friends: ‘I told you so!’” Now, we’re not saying Obama’s victory solved anything as far as day-to-day race relations. But Hepburn’s operating assumption here seems to be that every single American voted on the basis of race! It’s true, as he says, that nearly 90 per cent of white Mississippians voted for McCain and 98 per cent of black Mississippians voted for Obama, but the numbers in 2004 were 85 and 90, respectively, and John Kerry—last we checked, anyway—is quite fair-skinned. So the situation would seem to be rather more complex.

The Star’s Haroon Siddiqui, meanwhile, is well chuffed with Obama’s victory in a general sense, arguing he’s done nothing less than “make Americans rediscover the common weal.” But the president-elect needs improvements in the following areas: Afghanistan, where he “think[s] mostly in terms of a major military surge” instead of negotiations, and Pakistan, where he’s suggested “cross-border attacks” instead of a “Marshall Plan-like economic blueprint for the border region where [Taliban] militants are recruited.” Nevertheless, Siddiqui argues, Obama is already being well-received in the Muslim world, if only because he pronounces Taliban “taa-li-baan” rather than “tay-le-ban.” (Really? Who the hell says “tay-le-ban”?)

Continue…

Rich people love socialism

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, November 6, 2008 at 12:59 AM - 7 Comments

According to CNN’s exit polling, Americans making $200,000 or more per year voted as so.

Obama 52%
McCain 46%

The honeymoon's over

By selley - Wednesday, November 5, 2008 at 11:49 PM - 20 Comments

Memo to all those Canadian pundits who believe Barack Obama will change vast numbers of Canadian progressives’ minds about the virtuousness of the United States of America. Maybe we should stay in Afghanistan, they’ll muse. What’s so bad about a common security perimeter, anyway? Surely we can trust Obama with our biometric data! Etc., etc. Anyway, it’s been 24 hours, and the media are already letting reality—or variations thereof—past security.

Progressive things Barack Obama probably won’t do, or help do:

• Send Omar Khadr home

Non-progressive things Barack Obama already did:

• Help get gay marriage banned in California

I’ll keep that updated as events warrant. (And, I should probably add, I hope I’m wrong—not about sharing our biometric data, but about Obama’s transformational abilities crossing the border.)

Healthy cynicism

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, November 5, 2008 at 10:08 PM - 3 Comments

Will Wilkinson (via Sullivan).

“The government of the state is profoundly important. And I think American voters picked a competent, decent, and sober executive officer. But this is not, headline writers, Barack Obama’s America. He is not your leader, any more than the mayor of your town is your leader. We are free people. We lead ourselves. He is set to be a high-ranking public administrator. Sure, there is romance in fame. But romance in politics is dangerous, misplaced, and beneath intelligent people. Were we more fully civilized, we would toleratethe yearnings projected on our leaders. Our tribal nature is not so easily escaped, after all. But we would try to escape it. We would discourage and condemn as irresponsible a romantic politics that tells us that if we all come together and want it hard enough, we’ll get it. We would spot the dangerous fallacy in condemning as ‘cynicism’ all serious attempts to critically evaluate the content of political hopes.”

“This has restored my faith in democracy."

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, November 5, 2008 at 4:48 PM - 2 Comments

So says Duncan Adel, a computer technician in Kenya.

Kenya’s own most recent presidential election was less inspiring.

Well, Joe Biden did say he'd be tested

By Paul Wells - Wednesday, November 5, 2008 at 4:19 PM - 8 Comments

And Dmitry Medvedev wastes no time offering Barack Obama a choice: Russia will deploy short-range missiles in Kaliningrad on the border of Poland and Lithuania — unless Obama prefers to abandon George W. Bush’s plan for missile-defence batteries in Poland and the Czech Republic.

Oh, and the future may be looking like a lot more Vladimir Putin.

The Cynic and Senator Obama

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, November 5, 2008 at 3:51 PM - 1 Comment

Charles P. Pierce, a few months back, in Esquire.

“We have not been a great country for a very long time, the cynic believes, and it does us no good to claim otherwise. We are not an honest and decent people in our politics, in the way we deal with one another as a political commonwealth. We will trade away our most precious rights in exchange for a bag of magic charms, and even when we find out that these include the black prison, the waterboard, and the secret microphone, we’ll think we got the better of the deal. We’ll swap our obligation to intelligent self-government for any huckster’s trick that makes us laugh or keeps us entertained in our cars for the evening drive-time shift. We hold this truth to be self-evident — that all men are out to get what’s ours.”

Megapundit: He "changed the subject"

By selley - Wednesday, November 5, 2008 at 3:28 PM - 3 Comments

Must-reads: Robert Fulford, John Ibbitson, David Frum, Doug Saunders, Dan Gardner and John Ivison on the only thing that matters today.

Oh yes he did
What the 44th President means to the United States, Canada and the world.

The Ottawa Citizen’s Dan Gardner traces a brief history of racist American legislation and public opinion for the purposes of highlighting just how far the nation has come, and how quickly. He recounts the story of Jacqueline Henley, a Louisiana toddler whose aunt found it impossible to raise her amidst rumours the child’s father was black, and whose adoption by a black couple was rejected by the courts on grounds she was officially white, and they wouldn’t inflict official blackness on her unless there was irrefutable evidence. That madness was in 1952; today, says Gardner, everybody knows Barack Obama’s mother was white and nobody cares. Heck, it was only 41 years ago the Supreme Court nixed anti-miscegenation laws, and in that time public approval of intermarriage has gone from 80 per cent against to 80 per cent in favour. In short, don’t you tell Dan Gardner that “moral progress” is impossible.

Can this “new Democratic coalition of New Southerners, liberal northerners, wary blue-collars, African Americans, Latinos and suddenly mobilized” youth be sustained, John Ibbitson asks in The Globe and Mail, or will it “dissolve as [Obama] struggles to reverse economic decline and financial panic”? It remains, naturally, to be seen. But Americans made a historic decision yesterday, he contends, that “the last eight years were a waste” and that “we need to start again”—and the world will take note. More fundamentally, however, Ibbitson says Obama’s victory is a reaffirmation of what’s possible in the political world. “Peace can come to Ireland. The Cold War can end. America’s racial wounds can start to heal.”

Continue…

You can stop feeling smug now

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, November 5, 2008 at 2:00 PM - 15 Comments

Our respective elections this year would appear to represent the first time since 1896 that voter turnout in the United States surpassed voter turnout here in Canada.

Obama taps NAFTA architect

By John Geddes - Wednesday, November 5, 2008 at 11:43 AM - 3 Comments

The first hard news of the Barack Obama era bodes well for Canada. Various U.S. media reports say the President-elect has asked Illinois Rep. Rahm Emanuel, a senior House Democrat, to be his chief of staff.

Emanuel is known in Washington circles as a smart political operator, who once worked as an inner-circle advisor to President Bill Clinton. For Canadians, the good news is that he was a key promoter of the North American Free Trade Agreement inside Clinton’s administration, and remains a thoughtful support of trade as a driver of prosperity, not a threat to economic security.
Continue…

post-election pre-future imagineering challenge

By Scott Feschuk - Wednesday, November 5, 2008 at 9:07 AM - 39 Comments

Don’t you wish elections ended like Animal House? I refer not to a wildly destructive parade in which cartoonish villains receive their comic comeuppance (although that too would be entertaining: ramming speed, Mr. President!), but to the handy denouement subtitles that let you know what becomes of the characters we met along the way?

Well, the time has come for someone to put his foot down. And that foot is me. I hereby declare our first and only post-election pre-future imagineering challenge. Let’s imagine what lies ahead for the people we got to know, love, hate and imagine naked*. Here are a few examples of what I mean: Continue…