A great article written by my favorite journalist, Carl Hiaasen.
Why Obama won, and why McCain lost
By Carl Hiaasen, The Miami Herald
On Tuesday, more than 64 million Americans voted for a black guy with a strange name to be their next president. When he won, the world's view of our country instantly changed, and so did the way we view ourselves.
President Barack Obama?
Two years ago, if you'd made such a prediction in any barroom, bowling alley or beauty parlor, the response would have been laughter or puzzled stares.
Yet, against all odds, here we are. The scene in Chicago's Grant Park the other night was unlike any election celebration in memory -- an ocean of exuberant young and old faces; white, black, Asian, Indian, Hispanic, native American.
Only the coldest of souls could have watched and not been moved.
Millions of words will be written about how it happened, but one of the keys to Obama's victory is obvious. He wouldn't have won so decisively if not for the outrageous mistakes and excesses of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, whose mess will take a long, long time to mop up.
Yet it's naive to believe that anybody could have beaten a Republican this year. For Democratic candidates, there's no such thing as a slam dunk. Given half a chance, they can blow any election.
Everyone remembers what happened in Florida in 2000, but let's not forget that Al Gore couldn't even win his home state of Tennessee. Four years later, John Kerry, a true combat hero, responded like a wimp when his war record was falsely maligned by the Swift Boaters. His campaign never recovered.
This year, Obama was as charismatic as Gore was dull, and as forceful as Kerry was tentative.
Even with the quagmire in Iraq and the economic meltdown at home, Obama couldn't have won election without uncommon self-discipline, unshakable poise and compelling skills as an orator. He also put together a superior fundraising machine and a campaign operation that was deft and saturating.
Everything had to come together in a huge way for a young African-American man to win the White House -- the candidate had to be exceptionally impressive, and the timing had to be just right.
Obama wouldn't have won so handily, and possibly not at all, had his opponent been the John McCain who ran against Bush in the 2000 primaries, instead of the John McCain who morphed into a cranky, fear-baiting panderer.
The self-proclaimed maverick flip-flopped eagerly to appease nervous conservatives. Although he'd once lambasted the Bush tax cuts for favoring the wealthy, he now embraced them as a centerpiece of his economic platform. Once he'd opposed offshore oil drilling as too risky and short-sighted, and now he touted it as an answer to energy independence.
McCain didn't just edge to the right; he veered hard. He lost his way, and he also lost track of the mainstream.
He attacked Obama's inexperience and then chose a running mate who was staggeringly unqualified to step in and serve as president, if needed. Picking Sarah Palin was McCain's first and most important executive decision as the GOP nominee, and he blew it.
Voters weren't the only ones who questioned his judgment; so did many party stalwarts.
More discouragingly, for those of us who admired McCain, was how quickly he abandoned his pledge to run a high-road campaign. As the victim of a scurrilous smear by Bush's weasels during the 2000 primary in South Carolina, McCain had vowed to stick to the issues.
But it wasn't long before he surrendered the helm to those with Karl Rovian scruples, and they went negative in a large way. The plan, neither cunning nor original, was to make America afraid of Barack Obama. It didn't work.
More than 64 million people came to the sensible conclusion that the Illinois senator wasn't really a softy, a socialist, a pal of domestic terrorists, a closet Muslim jihadist, a distant cousin of Osama bin Laden or any of the other idiotic inferences that surfaced in print or on the Internet.
While McCain's camp was spending millions trying to make Obama look scary, Obama himself remained cool and focused. As a result, most voters felt they knew him better, and trusted him more.
It's impossible to say whether the election would have turned out differently if McCain had run a campaign of positive ideas, but the contest surely would have been closer. Despite the crushing weight of the Bush legacy, he still drew more than 56 million votes.
Among those were some who fell for the fear-mongering, and others who'd never have voted for any African American. But there were also many who simply believed in their candidate.
We saw a glimpse of the other McCain in his gracious and eloquent concession speech, but you also saw why he lost. His crowd of supporters at the Biltmore in Phoenix was almost all white, the shrunken core of the Republican Party.
Mainstream America was in Grant Park, cheering their new president.
