Times they’re a changin’

Thus sayeth Tod Lindberg, in his WaPo piece “The Center-Right Nation Exits Stage Left.” Mr. Lindberg, a former Washington Times journo, a Hoover Institution fellow and an advisor to the McCain campaign, just told us… wait for it… “elections have consequences.” Well, more specifically, elections appear to have some significance as a reflection of how voters are actually thinking.
In short, a 52-46 presidential win, at least 57 Senators and a double-digit pickup in the House for the Democrats leads Mr. Lindberg (and anyone without their head up their ass, i.e., those not enmeshed in the Beltway kaffeefklatschkultur) actually means the country is leaning a wee bit liberal, i.e., while previously a “center-right” nation… we are now… wait for it… a “center-left” country. Amazing.
I readily acknowledge that the polity here is skewed in many ways to lean conservative, such as intrinsic regional biases that favor smaller, rural states in the senate (and hence the electoral college)… and hence, a Democratic win of this magnitude with a ticket headed by a Black man named Barack Hussein Obama, expresses something possibly emblematic of a huge swath of voter thinking… i.e., the national center of gravity has shifted.
We will see. I am trying to tell people to adjust their expectations about the kind of “change” we can expect from the Obama Administration, particularly as it appears to be staffing up, at least in its earlier stages, with those with prior experience in the somewhat “change-averse” Clinton Administration. My problem with the Clinton Administration, btw, was never with the rather competent professionals manning the vessel, so much as with the seemingly rudderless vessel itself, and a captain who was himself remarkably light on “the vision thing.” Not to mention those personal “issues.” So, Obama, who strikes me as suffering neither infirmity, seems well advised with staffing up with competent public servants.
It’s just that the institutional set-up is not organized for radical change, unless it’s bad and destructive change, as we received from the Bush II Administration. The kind of long-range constructive reforms we will need will take longer to implement, and longer to notice they are working. I believe that THE MANDATE that Obama and the Democrats received will allow Team Obama to get good things done… don’t accept for a minute the pronouncements of immediate defeat that will be forthcoming from the corporate media when “enough” things don’t happen during the meaningless “first hundred days.” And this would include some of my own pet causes, like closing Guantanamo; good things will happen, but will not occur nearly as soon as I would like. Hey, the perfect is the enemy of the good. So…
What do we want? GRADUAL CHANGE! When do we want it? IN DUE COURSE. Times, they are a changin’…