A Year of Difference
Exactly a year ago Barack Obama was sworn in as America's 44th president. The inauguration day was filled with pageantry and festivities, all of which I had completely missed. This has nothing to do with my ideology or my respect for the man – I just find all such self-congratulatory political events extremely tedious and have not watched an event like that in a long, long while. What I did find interesting, though, was a reaction in a college newspaper the following day by one of the more "moderate" college professors. He wrote mostly favorably about the whole shenanigan, but did have a major issue with two incidents that transpired that day: an unintentional gaffe by the Chief Justice Roberts and a mentioning, in passing, of Jesus by reverend Warren. So in the whole day there were exactly two conservatives who played any role and this supposedly moderate professor decided to criticize them and only them. Very moderate indeed. Since then I've learned that you are considered moderate at liberal strongholds like San Francisco and college campuses if you a) wear clothes on a regular basis, and b) use soap.
This mode of thinking was squarely in line with what I had experienced a few months earlier at a monthly lunch for new faculty. That particular lunch just happened to fall one day after the November 2008 election, and I was hesitant to attend it because I knew what an insufferable love-fest it was going to be. In the end, the curiosity overcame discomfort as I just needed to know how ridiculous their comments were going to be. From experience I know that there is nothing more amusing than watching otherwise intelligent people act like little kids without realizing that they were doing this. And sure enough, ridiculous statements and reactions abounded. The most outrageous one came from a very liberal faculty member who was gushing about how the election results clearly spelled the end of the "southern" bent of the Republican Party. He claimed that his grandfather or something like that used to be the head of the Republican Party of Massachusetts, and how the party there lost touch with its own "Rockefeller" roots and hence had become doomed forever.
Well, guess what. Just a year after The One had been anointed the unthinkable had happened. The good people of Massachusetts have elected Scott Brown to the US Senate, a Republican who is as far from the New England country club values as they come. This in a state that has not elected a Republican to the US Senate since 1972. This for the seat that had been held by the late Teddy Kennedy, "lion" of liberalism. This truly was a remarkable and historic election, and it had me glued to the news sources until late last night.
So what are the lessons, if any, of all of this? The first and the most important one is: don't gloat. We need to be constantly reminded that there is the Providence that shapes our lives and we shouldn't take any event, no matter how significant, as the final and ultimate vindication of our values. This is particularly true in the field of human endeavor that is as fickle as politics. Elections come and go, and there are bound to be swings in voter sentiment. Which brings me to the second point: don't idealize the politicians. They are people like you and I, subject to all the same foibles that we are, and it's just downright silly to invest too much hope in any one of them. No matter what, they will do some good things and are bound to make many mistakes. My personal hope is for such a political system where it won't really matter who is in power for most of my daily concerns. The final point is actually rather mundane compared to the other two: Democrats have clearly misunderstood their mandates, and as the last two sets of special elections have shown they are paying the price for it at the ballot box. No matter what happens until then, the elections in November of this year are going to be extremely interesting.