Election Reaction

I hesitate to make another political entry because I don’t want this to be a political blog. But, it is still the news and I heard and saw two pieces that I have to comment on.

First, there was an item on WGN radio news. A woman went to the Tribune Tower to pick up a special publication/edition of the paper chronicling the Barack Obama story. The story said she had never read the paper before. So, on what basis did she vote for him? If she didn’t read the paper, I doubt she regularly reads books. That’s not to say a vote for Mr. McCain was an educated vote. He certainly didn’t do what he could to educate possible supporters. All he had to do was tell us what the country would be like and eventually become with the kind of policies Democrats normally support. As John Kass put it, the U.S. will become an overfed “federal leviathan” that “will shrink our scope of individual liberties…” But Mr. McCain didn’t do that. Only in the last couple of weeks did he start telling the people that Mr. Obama was a socialist. Even if that were an extreme view, it would have put Mr. Obama on the defensive. He would have had to explain how his proposals wouldn’t lead the country in a European socialistic direction.

The second item I saw was on Roger Ebert’s website. He tells us there “our long national nightmare is over.” It’s good to see an accomplished writer make use of a cliché and that without crediting the Republican he took it from. I have a couple of questions and an observation for him: Where did you get your medical treatment over the last couple of years? Was it in the U. S.? Do you really think it will stay at that quality when the President-elect institutes his universal health care? And besides your personal health, how has your life been a nightmare in the last 8 years?

Then the observation: Eight years ago in the intervening time between election day and the time when the decision was made final in Florida, he went on a rant that said if George Bush was elected, it would be a sign that the American intellect was headed down. My first response was that I figured the sign of the declining American intellect was that we were listening to movie critics give political opinion (sorry, Michael Medved). Now, looking at last Tuesday’s results, I guess Mr. Ebert was right.