Melanie Phillips, Spectator.co.uk

 

So the answer to my question turned out to be yes, America really was going to do this. A historic moment indeed. The hyperbole for once is not exaggerated: this is a watershed election, which changes the fate of the world. The fear however is that the world now becomes very much less safe for all of us as a result.

 

Those of us who have looked on appalled during this most frightening of presidential elections – at the suspension of reason and its replacement by thuggery -- can only hope that the way this man governs will be very different from the profile provided by his influences, associations and record to date. It’s a faint hope – the enemies of America, freedom and the west will certainly be rejoicing today.

 

America has voted for change, apparently. Change from what, precisely? From Bush? But in the second term, Bush stopped being Bush. His foreign policy lurched from paralysis to appeasement (redeemed only by the strategic genius of Gen Petraeus – and what price Petraeus now?) Read article.

 

Sara Lepro & Tim Paradis, Buffalo News.com

 

A case of postelection nerves sent Wall Street plunging Wednesday as investors, looking past Barack Obama's presidential victory, returned to their fears of a deep and protracted recession. Volatility swept over the market again, with the Dow Jones industrials falling nearly 500 points and all the major indexes tumbling more than 5 percent.

 

The market was widely expected to give back some gains after a runup that lifted the Standard & Poor's 500 index more than 18 percent and that gave the Dow its best weekly advance in 34 years; moreover, many analysts had warned that Wall Street faced more turbulence after two months of devastating losses.

 

But investors lost their recent confidence about the economy and began dumping stocks again. Read article.

 

Jerry Bowyer, Political Mavens.com

 

Barack Obama is a Fabian socialist. I should know; I was raised by one. My Grandfather worked as a union machinist for Ingersoll Rand during the day. In the evenings he tended bar and read books. After his funeral, I went back home and started working my way through his library, starting with T.W. Arnold’s The Folklore of Capitalism. This was my introduction to the Fabian socialists.

 

Fabians believed in gradual nationalization of the economy through manipulation of the democratic process. Breaking away from the violent revolutionary socialists of their day, they thought that the only real way to effect “fundamental change” and “social justice” was through a mass movement of the working classes presided over by intellectual and cultural elites. Before TV it was stage plays, written by George Bernard Shaw and thousands of inferior “realist” playwrights dedicated to social change. John Cusack’s character in Woody Allen’s “Bullets Over Broadway” captures the movement rather well.

 

Arnold taught me to question everyone–my president, my priest and my parents. Well, almost everyone. I wasn’t supposed to question the Fabian intellectuals themselves. That’s the Fabian MO, relentless cultural and journalistic attacks on everything that is, and then a hard pitch for the hope of what might be.

 

That’s Obama’s world. Read article.

 

Kathryn Jean Lopez, NRO.com

 

Forgive me for not getting swept up on the wings of change.

 

Of course, it is impressive that a man named Barack Obama has been elected president of the United States of America. He came out of nowhere and is now president-elect. In a nation where not so many years ago many blacks could not vote, this is no small thing. But to pretend that being a black man who has run a successful campaign is the stuff of commanders-in-chief is patronizing. In truth, the road to the White House for Barack Obama has been populated by a media and an opponent who gave him a pass on fundamental issues of record and judgment (Bill Ayers, Jeremiah Wright, abortion …. ).

 

Some readers tell me blacks in America needed this. I question that. I think it’s a pretty shallow contention, born of white guilt. Do I believe blacks — along with others — are inspired and uplifted by the mere elevation and election of Obama? Of course. I see it. But I submit that Obamania is more about ideology for a lot of people than they are letting on. And before long, many who gave him a pass or were victimized by the pass others who knew better gave him, will wake up and be disappointed. Read article.

Byron York, NRO.com

 

In January, a few days before the South Carolina Democratic primary, I went to a Barack Obama rally in Columbia with a Republican friend who had never before seen Obama in action. This friend’s reaction: "Oh, s**t." The super-enthusiastic crowd was about 3,000 strong — no big deal compared to the audiences Obama would later draw in the general election, but several times what John McCain was attracting in South Carolina at the time. My friend said the scene reminded him of the old clip from Jaws, in which the small-town sheriff, seeing how big the shark really is, says, "We’re gonna need a bigger boat." The question, of course, was whether Republicans actually had a bigger boat.

 

Now we can say for sure that they didn’t.

 

In his concession speech, John McCain referred to his effort as "the most challenged campaign in modern times." He was right. What sank McCain’s presidential bid was a set of the worst conditions to face any candidate in decades, in combination with an opponent who was not only a better campaigner but also the favorite of the nation’s media establishment. And there was some luck involved, too. Read article.

 

Susan Jones, CNS News.com

 

Voters on Tuesday did not reject conservatism, a longtime conservative activist said. “They rejected Big Government Republicanism in all its forms, including the Bush administration and the Republican leadership in Congress.”

 

Richard A. Viguerie, chairman of ConservativeHQ.com, said the Republican defeat in 2008 “can and will be laid at the feet of the Big Government corporate Republicans who abandoned the Reagan coalition, massively expanded government, and ignored the needs and values of regular, grassroots Americans. They protected Wall Street and K Street and forgot about Main Street."

 

According to Viguerie, Republicans will make a comeback only when they return to their conservative roots. Read article.

 

Thomas Frank, OnlineWSJ.com

 

I was never a fan of Barack Obama's bipartisanship routine. His famous plea at the 2004 Democratic convention for an end to the red state/blue state divide, I thought, sounded noble but overlooked the obvious: that a unilateral display of brotherly love from the Democratic Party had no chance of actually ending the culture wars. The reason those wars have raged ever since 1968 was because they help Republicans win elections. For Democrats to wish that they would please stop was about as useful as asking Genghis Khan to a tea party.

 

What would beat the culture wars was always clear from the pseudo-populist language in which they were framed. In place of a showdown between a folksy "middle America" and a snobbish "liberal elite," Democrats needed to offer the real deal -- the conflict between a public that craves fairness and an economic system that enables the predatory.

 

Acknowledging class was always difficult for "New Democrats" -- it was second-wave, it was divisive -- but 2008 made retro politics cool again. Watching the Dow get hacked down, seeing the investment banking industry collapse, hearing about the lavish rewards won by the corporate officers who brought this ruin down on us -- all these things combined to make a certain Depressionesque fury the unavoidable flavor of the year. When your mortgage is under water and your neighbors are being laid off, the need to take up the sword against arrogant stem-cell scientists becomes considerably less urgent. Read article.

 

Morris & McGann, Vote.com

 

While the Democrats and Barack Obama won big yesterday, even coming close to a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, Obama will find their options substantially constrained by reality.

 

Their handicap is the financial condition of the nation they'll inherit. Think of a trustee or conservator of a bankrupt company.

 

Those who fear a radical Obama miss the point of the lack of maneuverability of the next president. Behind the mortgage crisis looms the credit-card crisis, the student-loan crisis and the car-loan crisis. Sweating this mess out of the system will take two years of zero growth or contraction.

 

We won't have a Great Depression, for the government will irrigate our economy with money. But we'll have stagnation, followed by inflation.

 

So Obama will take office with unlimited political power but highly circumscribed practical power. He can pass whatever legislation he wants, but will be unable to indulge his ideology. Read article.

 

Maverick McCain Ran as Himself

Aryeh Spero, Human Events.com

 

The Republican Party lost because of John McCain, and McCain himself lost much. But he will now return to the Senate having run a campaign that did not jeopardize the status he cherishes as the non-partisan, not-too-Republican Senator from Arizona.

 

McCain seemed to campaign with an eye towards having it both ways. It often appeared that he was saying, “If I win fine; but I’ll do little to identify and intertwine myself with the Republican Party, so that if I lose I’ll be able to return to the Senate, once again, as the leader and elder statesman 'above partisan politics.' McCain ran as a sort of independent, caring little about the health of the Party that was entrusted to him.

 

Never in memory has the head of a political ticket so rarely invoked the name of the Party in whose behalf he was running and so distance himself from the Party as did McCain. We hardly ever heard him ask the public to elect Republican members of the House and Senate, governors, or those seeking office all the way down the chain. That’s what the head of the Party is supposed to do. It’s called loyalty and responsibility: it's called leadership. Read article.

 

WND.com

 

U.S. Supreme Court Justice David Souter has rejected an emergency appeal for the court to halt the tabulation of the 2008 presidential election results until Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama documents his eligibility to run for the office, according to an attorney who brought the action that challenges the Illinois senator's standing in the race.

 

However, the issue isn't going away, at least for now, since Souter set a schedule for a response from Obama to the challenge from attorney Philip J. Berg.

 

As WND reported, Berg brought his claims to the Supreme Court after a federal judge dismissed his lawsuit alleging Obama is ineligible to be president because he possibly was born in Kenya.

 

The judge concluded Berg lacks standing to bring the action.

 

The 34-page memorandum that accompanied the court order from Judge R. Barclay Surrick said ordinary citizens can't sue to ensure that a presidential candidate actually meets the constitutional requirements of the office.

 

Instead, Surrick said Congress could determine "that citizens, voters, or party members should police the Constitution's eligibility requirements for the Presidency," but that it would take new laws to grant individual citizens that ability.

 

"Until that time," Surrick says, "voters do not have standing to bring the sort of challenge that Plaintiff attempts to bring."

 

In a statement today, Berg said he was told by a clerk for Souter that his application for an injunction to stay the election was denied. But he also said the defendants "are required to respond to the Writ of Certiorari" by Dec. 1. Read article.

 

Wynton Hall, Townhall.com

 

Sen. Barack Obama won for a simple reason: historical amnesia.

 

I once asked a room full of college students who the father of capitalism was.

 

Crickets began chirping as blank stares shot my way.

 

“Oh, come on,” I prompted. "Does anyone want to take a guess?”

 

Finally, one bold student blurted out, “Isn’t it Karl Marx?”

 

(That creaking sound you’re hearing is Adam Smith rolling over in his grave.) Sadly, this is a true story. And sadly, this kind of economic and historical amnesia goes a long way toward explaining how the most far-Left candidate in American presidential history wound up in the White House. Read article.

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