NY Post.com

 

Is Sarah Palin the answer for defeated Republicans?

 

After a historic rebuke at the polls, the Republican Party is staggering into an uncertain tomorrow with the White House and Congress in Democratic hands, no certain leader in sight and its membership divided over what it means to be a Republican.

 

Ever since her selection as John McCain's running mate in late August, Palin, the 44-year-old Alaska governor, was the star of the GOP ticket, though views of her vary wildly across the political spectrum. With the Republican brand corroded and the hunt on for the next Ronald Reagan, Palin could be one of many people competing to influence Republican ideas in the post-Bush era, maybe even as the party's leader.

 

"Conservatives are still looking for Mr. Right. And maybe Mr. Right turns out to be Ms. Right," said Bill Whalen, a fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution. Read article.

John Podhoretz , Commentary Magazine.com

 

Newsweek is dribbling out its quadrennial, always-riveting (no irony here) behind-the-scenes look at the 2008 campaign. In the first installment today, we watch Barack Obama as he slowly commits himself psychologically to the race throughout the year 2007. As he unsteadily begins the endless series of debates that consumed the year, he finds himself angered and discomfited by the format. That’s as it should be for any rational person. But look what made him especially uncomfortable:

 

Obama bridled at the sometimes mindless rituals and one-upmanship of a national political campaign in the age of cable news. He resented the pressure he felt to declare, as he put it to NEWSWEEK, that you “want to bomb the hell out of someone” to show toughness on terrorism.

 

I pray this sentence is a misrepresentation of what Obama meant, because if it is accurate, we have just elected a president who resents and resists the idea that a terrorist attack on the United States or its interests in the wake of 9/11 requires a military response if one is possible. Read article.

Gerard Baker, TimesOnline.co.uk

 

Most historical observations about Barack Obama’s victory in the US presidential election on Tuesday have focused on his race. But by many measures it would have been a singular political achievement, whatever the colour of his skin.

 

For a start, in terms of the popular vote it was the best performance by a Democratic candidate since Lyndon Johnson in 1964. His 52 per cent made him only the third Democrat in the past 100 years to win a clear majority of the votes of Americans.

 

It was also the highest share of the vote by a nonincumbent president or vice-president from either party since Dwight Eisenhower in 1952. The first-term Senator from Illinois, in other words, did better than the governors George Bush in 2000, Bill Clinton in 1992, Ronald Reagan in 1980 and Jimmy Carter in 1976, the former Vice-President Richard Nixon in 1968 and the Senator and decorated war hero John F. Kennedy in 1960.

 

President-elect Obama won votes in parts of the country no Democrat has reached in decades.The long period of conservative domination that began with the election of President Reagan almost 30 years ago certainly seems to be over.

 

But America is a big, complex country that defies easy characterization, and there was plenty in Tuesday’s results to give pause to anyone tempted to think that the country is about to reinvent itself as a European-style social democracy. Read article.

 

Shelby Steele, LA Times.com

 

Barack Obama seduced whites with a vision of their racial innocence precisely to coerce them into acting out of a racial motivation.

Shelby Steele

 

For the first time in human history, a largely white nation has elected a black man to be its paramount leader. And the cultural meaning of this unprecedented convergence of dark skin and ultimate power will likely become -- at least for a time -- a national obsession. In fact, the Obama presidency will always be read as an allegory. Already we are as curious about the cultural significance of his victory as we are about its political significance.

 

Does his victory mean that America is now officially beyond racism? Does it finally complete the work of the civil rights movement so that racism is at last dismissible as an explanation of black difficulty? Can the good Revs. Jackson and Sharpton now safely retire to the seashore? Will the Obama victory dispel the twin stigmas that have tormented black and white Americans for so long -- that blacks are inherently inferior and whites inherently racist? Doesn't a black in the Oval Office put the lie to both black inferiority and white racism? Doesn't it imply a "post-racial" America? And shouldn't those of us -- white and black -- who did not vote for Mr. Obama take pride in what his victory says about our culture even as we mourn our political loss? Read article.

 

Jennifer Loven, MyWay.com

 

Over and over, Barack Obama told voters if they stuck with him "we will change this country and change the world." They did, and now their expectations for him to deliver are firmly planted on his shoulders. Many supporters greeted his victory with euphoria.

 

Impatient for a new American era and overcome by a black man's historic ascension to the White House, they took his achievement for their own - weeping, dancing in the streets, blaring happy horns into Wednesday morning.

 

But campaign rhetoric soon collides with the gritty duties of governing, and hard realities stand in Obama's way.

 

The youthful president-elect appears to know this. His victory speech emphasized humility far more than his fabled confidence, with remarks heavily leavened by references to the difficulties before the nation.

 

He declared "change has come to America" and closed with his "yes we can" campaign slogan, but not before speaking of the certainty of setbacks. "The road ahead will be long," Obama warned. "We may not get there in one year or even one term."

 

Atop Obama's challenge list is the global and domestic turmoil that he inherits. None of it is his own making, but it will shape his presidency before he lifts one finger. Read article.

James Taranto, OnlineWSJ.com

 

For the 56th time, Americans elected a president. For the 22nd time, they chose someone not of the incumbent's party. Oh, and for the first time, the winner was a black man. Which is to say that yesterday's election was both completely ordinary and--partly by virtue of its ordinariness--history-making and extraordinary.

 

We'll have more to say about this in the coming days, but for now we are going to keep it simple. The 2008 election proves that our country has made a lot more racial progress over the past few decades than many people thought it had as recently as a couple of days ago.

 

At one time--let us say 1964, before the passage of the Voting Rights Act--it would have been fanciful to suggest that America could elect a black president. Forty-four years later, America has done just that. At some point along the way, a barrier fell.

 

We would argue that the barrier fell decades ago--that by the 1980s, or the '90s at the latest, antiblack bias had receded to the point that the right black candidate could have been elected. There is no way to prove this, of course, but today no one can deny that the barrier fell by 2008. Read article.

John Stossel, JWR.com

 

"Who do you want to have run this country?" Chris Matthews asked repeatedly on MSNBC.

 

"One of these guys is going to be running the country," said Michael Goodwin of the New York Daily News.

 

Really? Run the country?

 

"That has to be a joke — or a misunderstanding," said George Mason University economist Walter Williams on my recent TV special, "John Stossel's Politically Incorrect Guide to Politics".

 

Williams pointed out that the White House doesn't govern what happens in your house. And a president certainly cannot control the economy. We, all of us, run the country.

 

"Politicians have immense power to do harm to the economy. But they have very little power to do good," Williams says.

 

The failure to understand this is at the root of many of our problems. Read article.

 

Mark Steyn, NRO.com

 

The phrase is apt, I think. Congratulations to President Obama, as we must come to think of him. I agree with Jonah. He fought a brilliant campaign, beginning with his total befuddlement of the supposed sharpest operators in the country, the Clintons. Where's the old politics of personal destruction when we needed it in the snows of Iowa, eh?

 

As for us losers, there's no point going down the right-wing version of Bush Derangement Syndrome. Any shrill vicious ad hominem invective would be much better directed at each other. The Republicans lost this election. I disagree with Lisa. I think we are near a point at which America joins the rest of the west as a center-left society — that's to say, a society whose assumptions about the role of government and the size of the state are far closer to Continental social democracies than to the Founding Fathers. Read article.

 

Nat Hentoff , JWR.com

 

I have often cited the voluble and often humorous Joe Biden as a passionate practitioner, and defender, of free speech.

 

But on Oct. 23 — after participating in at least 200 interviews since chosen as Barack Obama's vice presidential on the Democratic ticket two months ago, Biden — offended at a question by an Orlando WFTV TV reporter-anchor — did not object when the Obama campaign then forbade more appearances on that station by its campaigners until the elections.

 

Maybe radio and TV folks should watch their words, too. A considerable number of leading congressional Democrats are eager to bring back the Fairness Doctrine (in effect from 1949 to 1987) that empowered the government to insist that broadcast stations (and now cable) provide opposing viewpoints to controversial offending remarks on stations, on pain of the stations losing their licenses.

 

I've always been surprised that self-proclaimed liberal Democrats, in and out of Congress, are so eager to diminish the impact of the speech of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, Laura Ingraham, et al, that they want to give the government (Republican or Democratic) this censorship sword. Can you imagine the Founders' reaction? If I may gently ask Biden: "Are you in favor of bringing back the Fairness Doctrine? Is Obama?" Read article.

 

Dave O'Brien, Aurora Advocate.com

 

The college-age vote was expected to be a large part of the tally in the Nov. 4 election.

 

The Associated Press recently reported a lot of out-of-state students registered to vote in Ohio because they thought their votes would be more effective than in their home states.

 

Considering what happened in 2000 and 2004, they might have been right. Lois Enlow, deputy director of the Portage County Board of Elections, said registrations came in from "many" campus groups.

 

The Kent State University College Democrats latched onto Barack Obama, and took advantage of the buzz surrounding the ability to vote in Ohio prior to Election Day for the first time in a presidential election, organization president Jared Matthews said.

"With the voting early option available for students to utilize this year, I strongly believed the youth vote was unprecedented in this election," he said, adding voter registration was the central theme of the organization's efforts this semester. Read article.

 

 

 

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