2AM Traffic

I really believe that American politics routinely comes down to one set of principles versus another. The differences between McCain and Obama were pretty much the same differences between Kerry and Bush, Gore and Bush, Clinton and Dole, Clinton and Bush Sr., and on and on. For the past three elections, people in America have been split almost right down the middle in terms of the popular vote. One American goes one way, another goes the other way.

Why does this happen? How can two parties, representing two separate sets of principles, have a tug of war with one another and win back and forth so routinely? Why would a Republican suddenly vote for a Democrat, or vice versa, or declare themselves undecided?

It comes down to who has the better words to act as a salve for America's suffering. The country is perpetually broken, can perpetually be improved, but this reality is rarely stated in plain facts, instead covered up by fancy buzzword rhetoric. Obama mentioned it in his victory speech last night in a way no politician has in a long time. America has not yet reached a state of political, social and certainly not economical perfection. It never has. Yet more often than not, I think, campaigns are run on the idea that America is perfect by virtue of its democratic process and freedom of cultural and religious expression - its faults are always the other party's. Obama's and McCain's campaigns generally followed suit, Obama armed with eight years of Bush policy failures and McCain chomping at the Democrats' willingness to spend themselves into slavery to the Chinese.

But Obama said something very significant last night - in effect, "I won't be able to fix this country alone."

I think you have in Obama a politician who doesn't idealize America in the same way McCain does, and that's important. Obama spoke to a truth about the country's imperfections that voters connected with. Beyond this, he represented it symbolically, a black man with the presidential office in his sights, a success in spite of socio-political imperfections. That's what he will base his first term as president on. Successes in spite of imperfections.

Will it make America better? Maybe. Obama has a background as a community organizer. He's trained to pull people together to accomplish goals in order to better their society. That's an important training for a president to have in a country so clearly divided down party lines.

A part of me wants to say that I'm glad Democrats gained the White House and strengthened their Senate presence because I despise certain Republican principles, base or otherwise - bans on abortion and gay marriage, a belief in the right to bear arms, opposition to stem cell research - and I believe these principles have no place in government because they promote discrimination while robbing what I believe should be the fundamental rights of people in a free nation.

But that's not why I'm happy that Obama won last night. I'm happy because America needed a leader who wouldn't disappear from the public eye in a silent declaration that he had failed the country in most of the decisions he made while in office. I'm happy that Americans elected Obama not out of fear, but out of a willingness to believe in his message of change. Hollow platitudes? Again, maybe. He hasn't taken office yet. No one is sure what he'll be capable of. But I'd never seen anything like the look in the eyes of those watching his speech last night - a crowd of thousands of voters across lines of ethnicity, religion, and sexual orientation. A unified belief, not in Obama, but that the country must get better, and that his election indicated that it's possible.

It's not really up to Obama how the next four years go. It's up to the people over whom he presides. Last night was a good start.