Yes We Can

This year marked the first presidential election I've actually paid serious attention to. (2004 was a joke, and I was too young to care in 2000. I guess 2000 was also a joke, albeit a much less funny one.) I mean it, too: I watched every debate, kept up pretty well with the stories on the news, and watched Meet the Press every week. (Tim Russert, you are sorely missed.)

This started back in January. I didn't start paying attention to the Democratic race until it had dwindled to Obama, Clinton, and Edwards--right around when Richardson dropped out. I started keeping up with the Republicans when the field still included Giuliani, Thompson, Huckabee, McCain, and Romney.

Giuliani struck me as sleazy. Thompson and Huckabee were gone before I had time to seriously consider them. (Huckabee actually got an endorsement from Chuck Norris, which should have sealed a victory.) I liked Romney's eloquence, and fondly (if faintly) remembered McCain from the 2000 campaign.

Regarding the Democrats, Edwards never gained enough traction to be worth considering. I've never been able to stand listening to Clinton speak, and wondered how brutal the campaign would be if the Republicans were able to dredge up their old attacks on Mr. Clinton. Obama, on the other hand, is a wonderfully eloquent speaker, and came in with a history free of political scandal or embarrassment. (That his record was free of pretty much anything was also one of his greatest weaknesses.) Petty as it sounded, I favored Obama over Clinton based on who I could stand listening to.

Along with what seemed like most of America (not to mention the rest of the world), I had been against Bush for as long as I could remember. Through this year, I'd spent my entire adult life ashamed of my president; I cringed every time he opened his mouth. It slowly dawned on me that, despite his embarrassing performance in office, the greater concern should have been that enough people showed up on Election Day to put him there in the first place. While most of the attention of the '00 election result fell on Florida, that debacle would've been nothing but an amusing footnote, had Bush not carried twenty-nine other states.

I also understand that a consequence of a de facto two-party system is that you don't have to be a good candidate or run a good campaign. All you have to do is beat the other guy. That in mind, Gore can be faulted for losing to a guy like Bush. Of course, a portion of the election results can also be attributed to the pretend-fury over the Clinton impeachment.

The point is, I fully realize that it'd be silly to blame Bush for putting Bush in office, or Gore for not doing a better job, or even their respective parties for creating the sensation over the impeachment and Lewinsky scandal. The blame should fall squarely on the American people.

Watching coverage of the campaigns, with the candidates' town hall meetings, I grew more and more ashamed of my country. I understand that the lady who called Obama an Arab wasn't speaking on behalf of all, most, or (hopefully) even some of the American people. I also was proud to see McCain politely but firmly cut her off, correct her, and restate his respect for Obama, amid a chorus of boos.

What bothered me was how much emphasis was being placed on inane things like Obama's name, his heritage, and his faith, as well as how much people seemed to be eating that stuff up. While criticisms regarding his almost complete lack of experience were well-founded, most of the rest of it was laughable.

The more I saw McCain's respectable positions and opinions, and contrasted them with the behavior of the Republican base, the more emphasis I began to place on the parties themselves. (It didn't help that the 72-year-old McCain chose as a running mate a 34-year-old who by all appearances had never considered matters outside of her state prior to August 2008.)

Once the dust settled from the primaries, and the contest became McCain vs. Obama, I thought long and hard about it. Choosing between John McCain and Barack Obama as individuals was really, really hard. I freely acknowledged McCain's vastly superior record with respect to campaign finance reform and occasionally rebuffing partisan expectations. In fact, I actually wasn't able to decide which candidate I liked better.

In addition to finding Palin to be a simply horrible candidate for the office, I didn't know enough about Biden to think much more highly of him. What decided that was the increased importance of McCain's running mate, due to his age; I don't know whether I would have liked McCain-Romney any better than McCain-Palin.

What decided it for me was the party. The party of Bush and McCain is, from all I've gathered, primarily against abortion and same-sex marriage. The party's economic policy tends to promote free trade and deregulation, even in light of--and in the midst of--a disastrously receding economy. I disagree with all three of those standpoints, regardless of the candidate.

Of course, this says nothing about the Democratic Party. I simply don't know enough about their track record to decide, but I find myself stereotyping the Democrats as constantly changing their positions relative to prevailing public opinion. That stereotype also classifies Republicans as being reliable and consistent on their platform. Going by that stereotype, then, I can vote for a party that stands consistently and effectively on a platform I despise, or a party that's more prone to change its policies, which I sometimes agree with.

All that led me to choose Obama. I mailed my absentee ballot with pride. Come to find out, it didn't make a difference.

The grown-up in me knows that, through no fault of his own, Obama is going to be a huge disappointment. Let's face it: to fulfill all the hype, he'll just about have to cure AIDs, erase America's carbon footprint, and release a multiplatinum record. I just hope that the resulting backlash doesn't disenfranchise all the people my age who got involved in politics for the first time in '08. I expect him to be a fair-to-good president, and to give some very good speeches along the way.

For my students' part, everyone here had known the name Obama. They'd been shouting "Yes We Can!" for months. They also knew Clinton, and were vaguely aware of McCain. Books of Obama's speeches sell wildly here. One of my English teachers has audio CDs (plural) of Obama speaking.

That in mind, I'll end with a picture I found online. A site called Gizmodo found an Obama action figure made in Japan.



That's Obama relaxing under a kotatsu, which is basically a coffee table with a built-in space heater. On the table is a bowl of mikan, a type of mandarin orange that everybody in Japan eats during wintertime. Upon seeing the picture as my desktop wallpaper, one of my vice principals identified the thing next to Obama's head as a Famicom, the Japanese equivalent of the NES.