I’ve gotten so used to bad news, it took awhile for the good news to sink in, but, hey, it has. We won! Every candidate I voted for in my home state of Oregon won (plus the school and library levies won and all the nasty measures lost).We won the Congress! We won the Senate! Yay! I don’t think I’ve ever felt so happy about an election.
For six years I’ve been wondering (and often ranting on this blog); when will the American people have had enough? Well, the answer is–now. Enough of an unneccessary and botched war, enough of New Orleans left to drown, enough of torture, enough of warrantless surveillance, enough of scandal, enough of a ruling partyawash in arrogance, callousness, and cruelty.
They’ve had that arrogance “thumped” out of them, as our articulate president so eloquently put it. Little George W, the schoolyard bully, is going to finally have to learn how to share.
The most gratifying aspect of the election was to see that our democracy, so gravely wounded, still works. It was so wonderful to find my paranoid expectations proved wrong. No fixed elections. No carefully timed “terrorist attacks”. Sure, Karl Rove pulled out all this manipulative tricks. But this time around, none of them stuck.
I wondered what it would take to get Americans out into the streets, but as it turned out all we needed to do was walk into a voting booth.
The challenge for the new Democratic majority will be to live up to the responsibility the American people entrusted them with this November. They have to be leaders. They have to pull us back from the brink, restore our democracy, extricate us from Iraq, and restore our reputation around the world. They need to be leaders. They cannot afford to be cautious anymore. Yes, they must govern from the center. But opposition to the war in Iraq, and the Bush Administrations incursions on civil liberties comes from all across the political spectrum: from the military, from moderate Republicans, from traditional conservatives (as opposed to the radical neo mutation), and of course hose of us who live on the coasts, drink lattes, and read the New York Times. The last poll I saw showed that over seventy percent of Americans favor at least partial withdrawal from Iraq. (f that’s not a center, I don’t know what is. Some of the strongest protests against the Bush Administrations “extraordinary renditions” and flaunting of the Geneva Conventions has come from military officers.
Bush appears to be extending a conciliatory hand, but I suspect it will remain friendly only as long as he is under the impression that a few friendly words and shared meals will bring the Democrats around to his side. If the Democrats don’t use their new power to let him know that’s not how the world works, then they are betraying our trust.t
