It IS the death-knell. Demographics alone make it certain that the power of the Nixon-era narratives will continue to wane with each passing year. What happened last night was that the emerging Democratic majority declared itself perhaps a bit ahead of schedule. But it's no mirage.

For my entire lifetime, politics have been profoundly shaped by events that occurred before I was born. That we may be getting rid of the skeletons of the 1960s gives me more hope than anything else about what happened yesterday.

Wow, Greg, you sound like you're channeling me from January onwards. This was the reason I backed Obama against Hillary to begin with - because I didn't want to see another election based on 40 years ago.

Another thing - I said the election would break along generational lines rather than gender or racial ones. I was right.

2 for 2, bitchez!!!

We are a different nation this morning; alas, Tucker Carlson is still a wanker.

One more time....

Remember, remember, the 5th of November,
The rout of the wingnut lot.
I can see no reason
Why a rout so pleasing
Should ever be forgot.

WTF is wrong with the tubes today? One more time....

Remember, remember, the 5th of November,
The rout of the wingnut lot.
I can see no reason
Why a rout so pleasing
Should ever be forgot.

Amen, Greg. Pardon the self-promotion, but I posted this yesterday:

This feels like we're closing the loop on 1968. What if Bobby had won? (Not a given, I know.) Imagine if we had not gone down the path of Nixon's resentments and enemies list, if Rove's first lessons in the politics of division had been (and continued to be) in a losing cause, and instead we had elected someone who could speak to and unite the poor, union workers, and the pointy-headed elites.

Four decades later, that is where we may, at last, find ourselves by the end of the day.

good point Greg - and extremely important for the new leader to not be making foreign policy under the specters of WWII, Korea, and Vietnam.

Okay...I'm still a mess this morning. I cried first thing upon seeing the videos of people celebrating all around the world. Then I cried again as I was perusing newspapers from across the globe. Now I started crying when Bush was talking about the Obama's moving into the White House. What a wonderful, wonderful day....

It's simple: We need to fix the future, not fight over the past.

But I need to deal with mistakes of my recent past, last night, were I drank an awful lot for a weeknight....

More to the point, he did this by quite literally running against politics as both those groups practiced it.

Yes. Yes. Yes.

I may never be able to list all of the ways in which this election makes me happy, but this is near the top of the list. Obama has shown that a campaign with core principles and a strong positive message can defeat a campaign of sleaze. It's very powerful.

I have no illusions that it will all be kittens and sunshine from here on out, but still, it's a huge change in the right direction. It lifts us all.

I'm just so damned happy this morning.

And late. Why the hell should I be expected to make it to class on time on a day like this?

So happy to be proud of my president. So gratified to face the prospect of letting go of the resentment of the illegitimacy of the past eight years...to have a president who, for one thing, is, unambiguously, the elected president. And the right one. No better place for this morning than with all you TPM peeps...you were an important presence through this whole juggernaut!

All I know is that I love loving this country again.

I love us so much! The whole fucking country voted and the whole fucking world knows it - they know we turned out in record numbers to change history.

I'm still in shock -

Sweeter still - his popular vote margin was greater than the Shrub's, both the time he "won" stealing Florida and the time he "won" disenfranchising voters in Ohio.

The dark ages of the Republican party have come to an end. Thank you America, thank you so damn much!

In the end, our liberty was our justice for all!

Great post, and I so hope Rove and his style of politics go away forever after this. The American people have spoken!

but only a potential one

You Democrats just never got it. Finally people who believe in God and in this country have prevailed over the liberals. The Republican Party will rule forever.

That was roughly what the Chairman of the SF GOP told me after the 2004 election

Last night wasn't the end of anything
Just the beginning of the end I hope

I think Greg makes an important point when he talks about how Obama's political persona shaped this election. When people start dissecting and analyzing this race in the coming months (and years), they will try to draw lessons from it and figure out what to do and look out for next time. But the fact is a lot of what Obama did is specific to him and will probably be impossible for anyone else to reproduce.

Just for starters, Barack Obama is probably the only man in the country who could have delivered the "A More Perfect Union" speech. It relied heavily not only on the Obama's personal history but also on his fundamental likability. He just looks trustworthy and decent.

This is also why Obama was able to respond so effectively to negative attacks. His basic strategy was to gently chide his opponent, laugh at them a little bit and then talk about how this is not the kind of talk the country needs right now. This works if the majority of the public thinks that you are a trustworthy person, and according to the polls, Obama had that kind of support. Kerry and Gore would have had to come up with a different kind of response.

There are lessons to be learned here. Now we know that red states and blue states are not immutable and that the internet really can work as a fundraising tool. But we should also keep in mind how much of this could only have been done by Obama and that the next candidate will have to tailor his or her strategy to fit his or her particular strengths.

Abandoning the Sixties sets us back about a hundred years. The left during the sixties understood that Scandinavia has it right -- a much more effective way organize society to produce human happiness and prosperity. Obama is leading us to the perfect Republican suburb with the principle difference being that people of all colors can live there.

One of the things I admired about McCain was his ability to lay out an argument simply. He was almost always wrong but very, very clear and so it was with his concession speech. He maintained that the United States provides opportunity for all and that the past misdeeds of racism had produced 'memories' which were wounding. The fact is that our past misdeed of racism have produced objective conditions which continue to harm blacks. For example, uneducated parents are exhorted to guide their children through schools with limited resources in hopes of obtaining jobs in a poor economy while racism still reduces the chances of getting a job with the same resume as a white. Ward Connerly is deliberately blind to the continuing impact of racism: we can afford to cease to take actions to counteract it only when it ceases to exist -- as shown for example when we reach the point that the same resume sent out over a black sounding name produces the same results as the same resume sent out over a white sounding name. We have a ways to go. Look at the proportion of young black men with prison records.

Until we are willing to address the results of racism it is unlikely that our country will make the contributions to reducing the impact of our racial history that it could. It is true that by individual action black parents could improve the chances of their children in similar ways to the way immigrant groups have fought their way up in the pass (now that America is willing to give them this chance which was denied in the past when getting a PhD meant that a black could be a railway porter -- now it means you can be a professor.)

One of the marvels of the sixties was the insistence that it was okay to be different coupled with an enforcement of moral values: it was okay to be black, Asian, hippy, straight or whatever but it was not okay to be a bigot. (A very funny riff from the time detailed how the singer deplored how much bigots hated other groups and how he himself hated bigots like that -- it illustrates a pitful but the hatred against a bigot is based on his bad actions.)

This is very different thing than a pitch for unity which depends on the idea --- not that it is okay to be different -- but that we are all in fact the same. Thus is okay to excuse a bigot like Donnie McClurkin because under it all he is the same as all of us and it is okay for him to be 'different' in terms of his bad actions.

I don't know about a death knell, but I do feel that there is a healing in this election, different than any election I can recall since the 1960s. Didn't feel it with Clinton or Carter, though was glad the Dems won. In this election I got out and canvassed in Boulder, with my 11 year old son; my neighbor worked full-time at the Univ. of Colo. to register students, and my 77 year old mother in Pittsburgh, PA was proud to say she made over 1000 phone calls on behalf of Obama's campaign. We won because we overcame the apathy and cynicism and got on the phone and knocked on the doors to get out the vote, because we were inspired and felt the hope again. That hope, that activism on behalf of our better nature as citizens, is what John Kennedy inspired; that was the best part of the 1960s; that was a positive aspect of the 1960s culture, which died a terrible series of deaths, leaving us a frightened, disillusioned, grieving, cynical nation ripe for the taking by purveyors of negative politics. I am proud to be an American today, and I am going to remain active, in a hopeful, but forceful way, demanding better and doing my part to make it happen. And that is a part of the 1960s I knew, spoken to us by the John Kennedy that I remember, that I will carry forward into the new millenium.

But these attacks, and Obama's lack of service, didn't do him any damage.

Neither does Obama have the corrupt and corrupting relationship with the military that both Bushes have, and McCain shares. Notice today Powell is "not interested" in a position with Obama.
The military will not feel the same guarantee of impunity, immunity and relief from civilian oversight they had during the Bush/Cheney years.

Perhaps they won't even be so eager to start wars all over the world.

God, I hope so. Can we talk about the problems of right now and the future, instead of the 1960's?

My favorite part of the speech was when he asked what kind of changes we'd be responsible for over the next 100 years. That's the way we have to think now.

I'm not sure this is a death knell for anything. It's easy to get mislead by the inflated differences in the electoral college figures and ignore the fact that the actual vote differences are not that great. It's wonderful that Obama won, but the campaign was quite silly. Most major issues were ignored (other than the economy), and the media allowed the conservatives to get away with most of their distortions (e.g., a $900 tax difference for someone making $280,000 marks the difference between capitalism and socialism). Given the magnitude of the Bush disaster, it's not at all surprising that the Democrats had a comeback. As someone with roots with the 60's, I'm afraid the conservative backlash will continue for many years.

I just read this comment from Dick Armey: “The Republicans need to get back to what worked in the past,” said Republican Dick Armey. “We should start by asking ourselves, ‘What were we doing when people loved us?’.” — That seems to me to be the problem. The Republicans keep looking to the “past.” But America demonstrated yesterday that it doesn’t want to go back to that past. Reagan got the Republican wedge politics and race cards rolling with his racist 1966 gubernatorial campaign out in CA where he railed against the Rumford Fair Housing Act of 1963 and threatened to roll it back, just like the supporters of Prop 8 today. Reagan’s 1966 commercials warned that “the jungle was encroaching” into white neighborhoods. The race card politics emanating out of the Civil Rights era took the GOP a long way, all the way to the White House in 1980 when. again, Reagan launched his general election effort from the town in Mississippi where civil rights workers had been brutally tortured and slain by the Mississippi klan. But that race card cultural wedge issue stuff didn’t work this year, and, as a teacher myself, I understand that with all these new young voters, they just don’t hear Nixon’s and Reagan’s dog whistles anymore. The nation has moved on. Just look at what has happened in Virginia since George Allen uttered the word “macaca.” A new day has truly dawned.