Change is Coming

The race is over. The voters have gone home. A new President-elect waits in the wings. Barack Obama was elected with around 63 million votes nationally, to the 55 million of McCain. The Democrats failed, however to gain a super majority in the House or Senate.

I’ve had a day or so now to digest all that happened and I find myself teetering somewhere on the edge of apathy and sadness. My guy lost, well, really, my guys lost. I would’ve rather had Ralph Nader than the most liberal Senator in the last few years. I truly believe John McCain would be a better President at this time in history than Barack Obama.

It has nothing to do with race, but I can’t say that. I am, after all, a white Protestant male from the South, so apparently everything I say has a tinge of racism to it. I find it funny that every time a Conservative so much as mentioned race during the election, you had people coming out of the woodwork to scream racism and that race shouldn’t be a part of the debate. But then, after the votes were counted, CNN and MSNBC, and their ilk, couldn’t shut up about how great it was to have a black President, and how this was such a momentous day for African-Americans. Let me get this straight… a Conservative can’t mention race without being called a racist, but a Liberal can talk about it all day long and no one cares.

I was almost frightened watching the crowd at Grant Park in Chicago on election night. Some of them wept, other shouted in jubilation, and some knelt, savouring the moment. It seemed as though Obama were a new incarnation of Christ walking among the people. There are already video clips of people who think that, with Obama in office, they’ll never have to put gas in their car, or pay their mortgage. The exact words were “If I help him, he’ll help me.”

I’m not trying to take anything away from the moment. It is history unfolding with every day. There are some issues that trouble me.

I’ve met too many people who say they voted for Obama, but then can’t name his running mate. They know nothing of his past associations. Remember, these associations would keep him from working with any law enforcement branch, would likely cause him to fail an FBI background check, but he still became President. All I’m saying is: if you’re going to vote for someone, you should at least know who is running with them, because if something terrible should happen, the running mate is next in line for President.

He has appointed Clinton aficionado Rahm Emanuel as his Chief of Staff. This is the same Rahm Emanuel who told Conservatives that they could go #*%@ themselves. That’s the change we need.

Obama is also on record saying that he aims to bankrupt the coal industry, and that he wants to spread the wealth around. He's going to cut taxes on a group of people who pay no income tax already. Basically, Obama is instituting a new brand of government welfare and calling it a tax break.

It’ll be a rough four years, because you have half of the country that believes that government should have a hand in solving our problems. Yet the other half of the country believes in free enterprise and free market solutions to the issues of our time. Part of the nation believes in a super-strong Federal government, and the other half thinks that the federal branch should be weakened and the states should be stronger.

The next four years will be interesting if nothing else. The incoming Obama Administration has already said that they’ll face foreign difficulties, and that while it make look as thought they’ve made the wrong decisions, we the people should trust them that they are in fact the right decisions.

I say let history play itself out. After a few years, we’ll see just how much good or bad comes from a Democratic majority in each branch of government.