The System Worked

A thousand important things have been said already about the milestone of our first African-American president (and perhaps just as important for future demographic trends, our first mixed-race president.) But I've been thinking about something else this morning: not just Obama's election, but the entire system that led up to this moment. We hear so often that the American political system is broken, but I think the last two years suggest that our national politics are healthier than we have been led to believe.

It starts for me with Bush's approval rating. You run the country with breathtaking incompetence for eight years; you defy the constitution and the Geneva Conventions; you let an entire city drown; you fail to ask for an inch of sacrifice from the rich during the greatest concentration of wealth in our country's history. You do all those things, and it turns out the American people pay attention: you become the least popular president since the invention of polling. Yes, it took too long for the country to realize how disastrous the Bush Administration was, but 9/11 left us with a kind of political post-traumatic stress disorder that made it too hard to turn on our leader in time to vote him out the first chance we had. But eventually the country woke up.

Then when the campaigns began, they were serious, engaged, and hard-fought. Voters consistently out-manoeuvred the media consensus at pretty much every turn. Giant financial advantages or name recognition did not inevitably lead to victory. There were what, thirty debates? For the most part, the debates were serious and issue-driven to the point of being dull. But we slogged through them all.

Most importantly, the primary campaigns actually ended up selecting the best candidates. Both Obama and Clinton were top-of-their-class (both in their original education, and their current political standing.) They were both gifted and committed leaders, each of whom represented a demographic breakthrough that would have been unthinkable a generation or two ago. And on the other side, McCain was by far the most interesting and deserving in the Republican field. These were all people who -- unlike George W. Bush -- had the stature and intellect and instincts that we should expect in our Presidential candidates.

And when the system finally narrowed our options down to two choices, the campaign that followed had many commendable qualities. The debates were watched by record audiences. Crowds normally reserved for U2 concerts showed up to hear the candidates speak. Yes, there was an insane amount of money flowing through the Obama campaign, but the money was itself a measure of how engaged the electorate was, since the vast majority of it was coming from small donors. While many on the left prodded him to be more aggressive, Obama kept his legendary cool and ran an incredibly civil campaign all the way through. (Remember how people griped that he kept agreeing with McCain in the first  debate -- but then ended up winning it hand-down?)

The one glaring episode that smacked of the "old" American politics of illusion and pseudo-candidates -- the Sarah Palin pick -- looked for a few short days to be a successful ploy, but her boastful ignorance and her complete disregard for the truth were relentless chipped away by the media and the satirists. (We always complain that the media don't ask the tough questions any more -- who knew that the tough question would be "So, what newspapers do you read?") By the end, Palin was a net negative for McCain, and the condescending notion that McCain could win over Hillary voters with a candidate who shared none of their values was decisively rejected in the battlegrounds of Ohio and Pennsylvania.

And when it came time to vote, everyone showed up, waiting in those five hour lines to have their voices heard. This is the most engaged electorate in modern times, and encouragingly, it's the youngest generation that seems to be the most intent on participating in the system.

So I look out at that landscape, and I think: yes, the country is in a terrible state, and it's going to take an immense amount of work and sacrifice and intelligence to turn things around. But the system that lets us choose our leaders seems to me to be as healthy as it has been in a long time. We get the leaders we deserve. For once, that's a good thing.

Comments

[Aaron Cohen]

Steven: Great points. Really good. Let me challenge you with some different questions that aren't being asked today: Given Obama's financial and organizational advantages, how did McCain win as many votes as he did? Shouldn't have lost 60/40? Why didn't he?

I think Barack does need to find a way to bring more people into the tent. His politics should be acceptable to everybody but people with far-right social views and that is certainly not 45-48% of the country.

[djp]

And you called it before anyone else...people should pay more attention to what you say!
Congrats to you, to America, and to the world.
Now, would you mind telling us how we should go about helping him change things?
I'm still fired up and ready to go!

[Bill Lindeke]

Well, I don't know if the "vast majority" was from small donors...

Lost in the attention given to Obama's Internet surge is that only a quarter of the $600 million he has raised has come from donors who made contributions of $200 or less, according to a review of his FEC reports. That is actually slightly less, as a percentage, than President Bush raised in small donations during his 2004 race, although Obama has pulled from a far larger number of donors. In 2004, the Bush campaign claimed more than 2 million donors, while the Obama campaign claims to have collected its total from more than 3.1 million individuals.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/10/22/politics/washingtonpost/main4538028.shtml

[hannah friedman]

My humble musical letter to president Obama:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4bZw9FmXZ4

Best,
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[Steven Johnson]

Interesting question, Aaron. I guess I would say the fact that he's going to end up with close to 53% of the popular vote is awfully close to 60% when you factor in race. If you look at this map, you can see it pretty clearly:

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2008/11/the-mccain-belt.html

Just back of the envelope, I imagine there's still 5% of the electorate out there that might well have voted for a Democrat this year, but that simply couldn't get around the hurdle of voting for an African-American. So when you consider that even with that drag, Obama won the most decisive Democratic victory in generations, it looks pretty impressive to me.

[Zeh]

@Bill: but there's where part of the genius lies. Unmentioned in this article (but mentioned on others) is that some people may have donated more than $200, they did so in small parts. Someone may have donated $30, then after doing so, became more engaged with the campaign and continued donating, potentially breaking the $200 barrier. It's been said that the power of Obama's donations was that he could always ask for more donations for the same contributors, while many other candidates had already maxed out their biggest donors.

According to one of Obama's campaign directors (of which name I forgot), just a couple of weeks ago the average donation was around $63 IIRC.

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