Full text: Barack Obama's victory speech
CHANGE HAS COME
If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible; who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time; who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.
It's the answer told by lines that stretched around schools and churches in numbers this nation has never seen; by people who waited three hours and four hours, many for the very first time in their lives, because they believed that this time must be different; that their voices could be that difference.
It's the answer spoken by young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled - Americans who sent a message to the world that we have never been just a collection of individuals or a collection of Red States and Blue States: we are, and always will be, the United States of America.
It's the answer that led those who have been told for so long by so many to be cynical, and fearful, and doubtful of what we can achieve to put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day.
It's been a long time coming, but tonight, because of what we did on this day, in this election, at this defining moment, change has come to America.
PARTNERS IN THE JOURNEY
A little bit earlier this evening I received an extraordinarily gracious call from Senator McCain. He fought long and hard in this campaign, and he's fought even longer and harder for the country he loves. He has endured sacrifices for America that most of us cannot begin to imagine. We are better off for the service rendered by this brave and selfless leader.
I congratulate him, I congratulate Governor Palin, for all they have achieved, and I look forward to working with them to renew this nation's promise in the months ahead.
I want to thank my partner in this journey, a man who campaigned from his heart and spoke for the men and women he grew up with on the streets of Scranton and rode with on that train home to Delaware, the vice-president-elect of the United States, Joe Biden.
And I would not be standing here tonight without the unyielding support of my best friend for the last 16 years, the rock of our family, the love of my life, the nation's next first lady, Michelle Obama. Sasha and Malia, I love you both more than you can imagine, and you have earned the new puppy that's coming with us to the White House.
And while she's no longer with us, I know my grandmother is watching, along with the family that made me who I am. I miss them tonight, and know that my debt to them is beyond measure. To my sister Maya, my sister Auma, all my other brothers and sisters - thank you so much for all the support you have given me. I am grateful to them.
To my campaign manager David Plouffe, the unsung hero of this campaign, who built the best political campaign in the history of the United States of America. My chief strategist David Axelrod, who has been a partner with me every step of the way, and to the best campaign team ever assembled in the history of politics - you made this happen, and I am forever grateful for what you've sacrificed to get it done.
VICTORY FOR THE PEOPLE
But above all, I will never forget who this victory truly belongs to - it belongs to you.
I was never the likeliest candidate for this office. We didn't start with much money or many endorsements. Our campaign was not hatched in the halls of Washington - it began in the backyards of Des Moines and the living rooms of Concord and the front porches of Charleston.
It was built by working men and women who dug into what little savings they had to give $5 and $10 and $20 to the cause.
It grew strength from the young people who rejected the myth of their generation's apathy; who left their homes and their families for jobs that offered little pay and less sleep; it grew strength from the not-so-young people who braved the bitter cold and scorching heat to knock on the doors of perfect strangers; from the millions of Americans who volunteered, and organised, and proved that more than two centuries later, a government of the people, by the people and for the people has not perished from the Earth.
This is your victory.
THE TASK AHEAD
I know you didn't do this just to win an election and I know you didn't do it for me. You did it because you understand the enormity of the task that lies ahead. For even as we celebrate tonight, we know the challenges that tomorrow will bring are the greatest of our lifetime - two wars, a planet in peril, the worst financial crisis in a century.
Even as we stand here tonight, we know there are brave Americans waking up in the deserts of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan to risk their lives for us.
There are mothers and fathers who will lie awake after their children fall asleep and wonder how they'll make the mortgage, or pay their doctor's bills, or save enough for their child's college education. There is new energy to harness and new jobs to be created; new schools to build and threats to meet and alliances to repair.
REMAKING THE NATION

The road ahead will be long. Our climb will be steep. We may not get there in one year or even in one term, but America - I have never been more hopeful than I am tonight that we will get there. I promise you - we as a people will get there.
There will be setbacks and false starts. There are many who won't agree with every decision or policy I make as president, and we know that government can't solve every problem. But I will always be honest with you about the challenges we face. I will listen to you, especially when we disagree.
And above all, I will ask you to join in the work of remaking this nation the only way it's been done in America for 221 years - block by block, brick by brick, calloused hand by calloused hand.
ONE NATION, ONE PEOPLE
What began 21 months ago in the depths of winter cannot end on this autumn night. This victory alone is not the change we seek - it is only the chance for us to make that change. And that cannot happen if we go back to the way things were. It cannot happen without you, without a new spirit of service, a new spirit of sacrifice.
So let us summon a new spirit of patriotism; of service and responsibility where each of us resolves to pitch in and work harder and look after not only ourselves, but each other. Let us remember that if this financial crisis taught us anything, it's that we cannot have a thriving Wall Street while Main Street suffers - in this country, we rise or fall as one nation; as one people.
Let us resist the temptation to fall back on the same partisanship and pettiness and immaturity that has poisoned our politics for so long. Let us remember that it was a man from this state who first carried the banner of the Republican Party to the White House - a party founded on the values of self-reliance, individual liberty, and national unity.
Those are values that we all share, and while the Democratic Party has won a great victory tonight, we do so with a measure of humility and determination to heal the divides that have held back our progress. As Lincoln said to a nation far more divided than ours: "We are not enemies, but friends… though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection."
And to those Americans whose support I have yet to earn - I may not have won your vote tonight, but I hear your voices, I need your help, and I will be your president too.
AMERICA IN THE WORLD
And to all those watching tonight from beyond our shores, from parliaments and palaces to those who are huddled around radios in the forgotten corners of the world - our stories are singular, but our destiny is shared, and a new dawn of American leadership is at hand.
To those who would tear the world down - we will defeat you. To those who seek peace and security - we support you.
And to all those who have wondered if America's beacon still burns as bright - tonight we proved once more that the true strength of our nation comes not from the might of our arms or the scale of our wealth, but from the enduring power of our ideals: democracy, liberty, opportunity and unyielding hope.
For that is the true genius of America - that America can change. Our union can be perfected. And what we have already achieved gives us hope for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.
A HISTORY OF STRUGGLE
This election had many firsts and many stories that will be told for generations. But one that's on my mind tonight is about a woman who cast her ballot in Atlanta. She's a lot like the millions of others who stood in line to make their voice heard in this election except for one thing - Ann Nixon Cooper is 106 years old.
She was born just a generation past slavery; a time when there were no cars on the road or planes in the sky; when someone like her couldn't vote for two reasons - because she was a woman and because of the colour of her skin.
And tonight, I think about all that she's seen throughout her century in America - the heartache and the hope; the struggle and the progress; the times we were told that we can't, and the people who pressed on with that American creed: Yes, we can.
At a time when women's voices were silenced and their hopes dismissed, she lived to see them stand up and speak out and reach for the ballot. Yes, we can.
When there was despair in the dust bowl and depression across the land, she saw a nation conquer fear itself with a New Deal, new jobs and a new sense of common purpose. Yes, we can.
When the bombs fell on our harbour and tyranny threatened the world, she was there to witness a generation rise to greatness and a democracy was saved. Yes, we can.
She was there for the buses in Montgomery, the hoses in Birmingham, a bridge in Selma, and a preacher from Atlanta who told a people that "we shall overcome". Yes, we can.
A man touched down on the Moon, a wall came down in Berlin, a world was connected by our own science and imagination. And this year, in this election, she touched her finger to a screen, and cast her vote, because after 106 years in America, through the best of times and the darkest of hours, she knows how America can change. Yes, we can.
THIS IS OUR MOMENT
America, we have come so far. We have seen so much. But there is so much more to do. So tonight, let us ask ourselves - if our children should live to see the next century; if my daughters should be so lucky to live as long as Ann Nixon Cooper, what change will they see? What progress will we have made?
This is our chance to answer that call. This is our moment.
This is our time - to put our people back to work and open doors of opportunity for our kids; to restore prosperity and promote the cause of peace; to reclaim the American dream and reaffirm that fundamental truth - that out of many, we are one; that while we breathe, we hope, and where we are met with cynicism and doubt, and those who tell us that we can't, we will respond with that timeless creed that sums up the spirit of a people: yes, we can.
Thank you, God bless you, and may God bless the United States of America.
Story from BBC NEWS:

Barack Obama For President

Andrew Sullivan
On a spectacular September morning more than seven years ago, our world changed. I remain one of those who believe that that day remains indelible, and its lesson unforgettable. The civilized democratic world came under attack from a small but lethal band of religious fanatics bent on destroying free societies, and, more terrifyingly, eager to get their hands on weapons of mass destruction that could make 9/11 look like a dry run.
We are still under attack.
This confluence of fundamentalism and lethal technology is the greatest danger of our time. And in the last seven years, the threat has not abated. Al Qaeda remains at large, and the very top leadership that planned and executed 9/11 is alive. They have reconstituted a base of sorts in Pakistan. They have scored several major propaganda victories - from Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo Bay to trapping most of the US military in an unending counter-insurgency in one country where al Qaeda was weak before 2002, Iraq. Islamist factions in Pakistan's government are horrifyingly close to nuclear technology. Iran has gained in power and influence in the Middle East and its ability to launch and use nuclear weapons is much greater than it was on 9/11. At its best, the Iraq war will lead to a fractured petro-state, closely allied with Iran, beset by constant infighting and terrorism. At its worst, Iraq will keep over 100,000 young Americans trapped there for the rest of our lives. The war in Afghanistan against the Taliban is at a seven year nadir.
Now the really bad news: the view of co-presidents Bush and Cheney is that this is a war that can and should be controlled by only one branch of government and a war in which the job of the citizenry is to shop. It is a global war where force of arms remains too often a first resort and in which talking to our enemies is regarded as "the white flag of surrender," instead of another tool at our disposal. It is a war where the American government has alienated - in some cases deeply - democratic allies whose police work and intelligence we desperately need. I do not doubt that military force is part of the mix to defeat this threat. (Like everyone else, I'm heartened that general Petraeus has introduced some minimal intelligence into the occupation of Iraq, although I fear it has merely made our presence more protracted and our withdrawal more difficult.) But the crudeness with which military force has been deployed, the absence of strategy or even due diligence in the execution of the long war, and the massive public relations blunders which have led the United States to lose a propaganda war against a bunch of murderous, medieval loons are unforgivable.
These mistakes were compounded - and in large part created - by what I believe will one day be seen as the core event of the last eight years: the collapse of constitutional order and the rule of law fomented in a mixture of hubris and laziness by the president himself. It is now indisputable that the president and vice-president of the United States engineered a de facto coup against the constitution after 9/11, declaring themselves above any law, any treaty, and any basic moral norm in their misguided mission to rid the world of evil. This blog has watched this process with increasing dismay - and watched several attempts to bring the US back to sanity foiled by a relentless and unhinged vice-president's office.
Cheney and Bush, unlike any presidency in American history, have dangerously pushed constitutional government to the brink of collapse. They did not merely assert a unified executive in which actions and regulations reserved to the executive branch were kept free from Congressional and judicial tampering. That is a perfectly defensible position, especially in wartime. They did not merely act in the immediate wake of an emergency to protect American citizens swiftly - again a perfectly legitimate use of executive power, unhampered by Congress or courts. They declared such power to be unlimited; they asserted also that it was as permanent as the emergency they declared; they claimed their dictatorial powers were inherent in the presidency itself, and above any legal constraints; they ordered their own lawyers to provide retroactive and laughable legal immunity for their crimes; they by-passed all the usual and necessary checks within the executive branch to ensure prudence and legality and self-doubt in the conduct of a war; they asserted that emergency war powers applied to the territory of the United States itself; they claimed the right to seize anyone - anyone, citizen or not - they deemed an "enemy combatant," to hold them indefinitely with no due process and to torture them until they became incoherent, broken, brutalized shells of human beings, if they survived at all. They did this to the guilty and they did this to the innocent. But they also had no way of reliably knowing which was which and who was who. Never before in wartime has the precious, sacred inheritance of free people been treated with such contempt by the leaders of the democratic West.
They seized countless individuals with no trials and no hearings. They tortured dozens to death. They subjected many more to some of the worst psychological torture techniques devised by Communist totalitarians and the worst physical suffering devised by the Gestapo. They crossed lines no American president had ever crossed before. They withdrew the US from the Geneva Conventions - and did so secretly. They tapped American's phones without warrants, and forced many of their randomly grabbed prisoners into the black hole of insanity. They set up secret sites in former Soviet gulags to torture their victims. They single-handedly devastated America's reputation for human rights and the rule of law in the minds of the vast majority of people in other Western democracies, let alone the developing world, let alone the millions of Muslims across the Middle East who now suspect that America is not really better than their own thugocracies, that America also tortures when it wants to, that the shining city on a hill is actually a place where men above the law can do anything they want to other human beings in their custody.
No economic mismanagement can compare with this attack on the basic institutions of our democracy and the constitution. No incompetence in conducting an occupation can be deemed comparable with this level of criminality and indecency. No reaction to a natural disaster, however hapless and negligent, is as grave as this crime. No financial crisis eclipses it in gravity. The president's oath is to protect the constitution from enemies foreign and domestic. Instead, the president himself became an enemy to the constitution he swore to uphold.
This is the depth of the predicament the United States is in. The Islamist threat remains; but the Constitution is in deep disrepair, the military stretched to breaking point, the national debt doubled, and America's reputation in terrible shape. More important, the president and vice-president deeply damaged the reliability and integrity of America's intelligence services, creating a self-perpetuating loop of phony intelligence procured by torture which then justified more torture which led to worse intelligence. It will be decades before we learn the full extent of the damage Bush and Cheney have done to the country's ability to find out what the enemy is really up to, how much risk these sadists and goons have subjected us to, how much damage to this country they may have facilitated by filling intelligence with the garbage always created by torture. We do know that their policy has led to just one successful prosecution - and that many guilty figures will escape justice because torture has tainted the legal process beyond repair.
My great fear since 2004 is that this could have gotten even worse. Another attack and the abuse of power could have become much worse. A Romney or a Giuliani, empowered by religious fanaticism and a worship of state power, could have taken us down a path much darker than even the Cheney-Addington-Yoo cul-de-sac. Ron Paul emerged as the one Republican prepared to defend the rule of law, the Constitution and habeas corpus in the primaries. But, in the end, McCain emerged by default, a torture victim himself, and a critic of some aspects of the conduct of the war. But we saw in 2006 that, when push came to shove, even McCain acquiesced to the legalization of America's use of the very same torture techniques once used against him. And in this campaign, we have seen how no Republican candidate can escape the logic of bigotry, fanaticism and xenophobia that now grips and motivates the Republican party base. We have also learned, much more importantly, that McCain would appoint Justices to the Supreme Court who would acquiesce to and constitutionally entrench the dictatorial presidency that Bush-Cheney believe in as loyally as Roberts, Alito, Thomas and Scalia. That means we are one vote away from the court ever restraining this unchecked executive. It doesn't matter who that executive is and what party he or she belongs to. What matters is that the controls upon it - controls critical to the endurance of constitutional balance and individual freedom in America - have been frayed to the breaking point. There is no greater cause right now than repairing that.
If I were to give one reason why I believe electing Barack Obama is essential tomorrow, it would be an end to this dark, lawless period in American constitutional government. The domestic cultural and political reasons for an Obama presidency remain as strong as they were when I wrote "Goodbye To All That" over a year ago. His ability to get us past the culture war has been proven in this campaign, in the generation now coming of age that will elect him if they turn out, in Obama's staggering ability not to take the bait. His fiscal policies are too liberal for me - I don't believe in raising taxes, I believe in cutting entitlements for the middle classes as the way to fiscal balance. I don't believe in "progressive taxation", I support a flat tax. I don't want to give unions any more power. I'm sure there will be moments when a Democratic Congress will make me wince. But I also understand that money has to come from somewhere, and it will not come in any meaningful measure from freezing pork or the other transparent gimmicks advertized in advance by McCain. McCain is not serious on spending. But he is deadly serious in not touching taxes. So, on the core question of debt, on bringing America back to fiscal reason, Obama is still better than McCain. If I have to take an ideological hit to head toward fiscal solvency, I'll put country before ideology.
But none of this compares to the task of restoring the rule of law and Constitutional balance. Unlike McCain, Obama has never wavered on torture or habeas corpus or on keeping the executive branch under the law. His deep understanding and awareness of the Constitution eclipses McCain's. Coming from the opposing party, he will also be able to restore confidence that what lies within America's secret government - the one constructed by Bush and Cheney beyond any accountability, law or morality - will be ended or cleaned up. He can restore critically needed trust again - and force the Democratic party to take responsibility for a war which we all need to own, and take responsibility for, again.
We cannot win this war without regaining our democratic soul, ending torture, and returning to lawful governance. But these things won't win the war either. On that, we have a perilous task ahead. I don't know how Obama will be able to get out of Iraq in his first term. I fear that Bush and Cheney have made withdrawal deliberately difficult if not impossible. I fear the same in Afghanistan. I don't know how Obama will handle Iran, given the power that Bush and Cheney have ceded to the Islamist regime there, and the danger of a pre-emptive strike before Obama even gets inaugurated. But I do know that he will handle these wars with reason, with prudence and with care. Those are three qualities absent from the White House for eight years. And I do know that Obama's very person, and what he symbolizes, will do more to restore America's image and repair our global public relations than any single measure any new administration will be able to accomplish.
The truth is: we are in a war for the future of human civilization. We are fighting for a world in which destructive technology need not collide with fierce religious fundamentalism to annihilate us all; for a world in which dialogue across cultures and religions and regions (even within America) is essential if we are to survive. We need to win the argument in the developing world; we need to reach out and persuade the Muslim middle - especially the next generation in Iran and Iraq and Pakistan and Saudi Arabia and Turkey and Western Europe - about the virtues of democracy and constitutionalism. We cannot do that if we trash our own values ourselves. It is self-defeating. We cannot be a beacon to the world until we have reformed ourselves. In this war, we are also fighting for an America that does not lose its soul in fighting our enemy. Just because we are fighting evil does not mean we cannot ourselves succumb to it. That is what my Christian faith teaches me - that no nation has a monopoly on virtue, and that every generation has to earn its own integrity. I fear and believe we have given away far too much - and that, while this loss is permanent, it can nonetheless be mitigated by a new start, a new direction, a new statement that the America the world once knew and loved is back.
It will not be easy. The world will soon remember why it resents America as well as loves it. But until this unlikely fellow with the funny ears and strange name and exotic biography emerged on the scene, I had begun to wonder if it was possible at all. I had almost given up hope, and he helped restore it. That is what is stirring out there; and although you are welcome to mock me for it, I remain unashamed. As someone once said, in the unlikely story of America, there is never anything false about hope. Obama, moreover, seems to bring out the best in people, and the calmest, and the sanest. He seems to me to have a blend of Midwestern good sense, an intuitive understanding of the developing world that is as much our future now as theirs', an analyst's mind and a poet's tongue. He is human. He is flawed. He will make mistakes. His passivity and ambiguity are sometimes weaknesses as well as strengths.
But there is something about his rise that is also supremely American, a reminder of why so many of us love this country so passionately and are filled with such grief at what has been done to it and in its name. I endorse Barack Obama because I will not give up on America, because I believe in America, and in her constitution and decency and character and strength.
And the world needs that America now as much as it ever has. Can we start that healing, that rebirth, tomorrow?

From The Sunday Times
Obama: I am the chosen one
Andrew Sullivan
Nobody knows what will happen on Tuesday, but there is a clear chance that one of the unlikeliest events in American political history could take place. A miscegenated black man could become president of the United States. And if the polls are accurate, the state of Virginia will be critical in any Democratic victory.
This state has not voted for a Democrat since 1964 but now gives Barack Obama a lead of about six points. That is remarkable from the perspective of the past few decades – but much more staggering when you take a longer view.
Virginia contains Richmond, once the capital of the Confederate slave states. As recently as 1961, when Obama was born, Virginia would have ruled his parents’ marriage illegal, because it was inter-racial. In fact, it was not until Obama was six that Obama’s parents’ marriage would have been made legal in that state, and Obama ceased being illegitimate. And that happened only because the US Supreme Court forced it. That is how far Virginia and America have come in Obama’s lifetime – and ours.
It would be easy to rhapsodise too sentimentally about this – but just as easy to understate its momentousness. I do not believe Americans or anyone else in the world will fully absorb it until it happens.
America, after all, was founded on one principle, freedom, but permeated by another, slavery. Slavery was America’s original sin and Obama is the fruit of its slow and painful self-absolution. The civil war over the question was immensely bloody – far bloodier per capita than any other war in American history.
The victory of the north led to intense resistance in the defeated south for a century of segregation and cruelty – and still divides the country to this day.
In fact if you place a map of the states that favoured the proslavery south over a map of the states that are now showing a trend for John McCain, you will get an almost perfect match. The only differences: Virginia has switched sides, and West Virginia has too. (It is now for McCain.) Florida, once part of the Confederacy, is also now prone to vote Democrat because of a massive influx from the north.
The rest is essentially unchanged since the 1860s. Even in America, the past controls the present.
Obama – for extra historic piquancy – is from Illinois and began his campaign in Springfield, where Abraham Lincoln started his. Like Lincoln, Obama is trained in the law, came from a humble background, and is aiming for the presidency with almost no executive experience.
People forget how inexperienced Lincoln was when he took office after one of the worst presidencies in American history – James Buchanan’s. Lincoln had held no legislative or executive office and had been a congressman for only two years previously. He became a national star primarily because of his oratory. Sound familiar?
Lincoln’s task is Obama’s: to unite a deeply fractured country. Lincoln’s challenges were far greater, but if Obama wins on Tuesday he will still face an immense set of challenges.
The United States is in two gruelling wars thousands of miles away, neither of which appears to be approaching anything that could be called “victory”.
In a mere eight years President George W Bush has doubled the national debt he inherited and turned a federal surplus into a half-a-trillion deficit.
Bush’s Republicans have also added a cool $32 trillion to future government liabilities and kept taxes unsustainably low unless entitlements are slashed in a manner no politician would contemplate. America’s real economy is in a recession and its financial stability is in doubt. Economic inequality has soared and cultural polarisation has intensified. The crisis America finds itself in is reminiscent of 1980, and perhaps 1932. Whoever inherits Bush’s awful legacy will have his work cut out.
A President Obama would start with the task that bedevilled his two predecessors. America remains deeply riven and the past president exacerbated those divides to keep himself in power.
You can see the fruits of that policy everywhere in the McCain campaign. The hardest core of McCain’s supporters seem not just to oppose Obama but to regard him as inherently illegitimate. They see him as at best a socialist and at worst a traitor. A clear minority refuses to believe he is a Christian and many believe he is not merely Muslim but allied with Islamist terror.
McCain and Sarah Palin, desperate to find an argument to wrest themselves out of their polling deficit, have deliberately and clearly legitimised this line of attack. Palin has said that Obama has been “palling around with terrorists”. A McCain spokesman last week said on cable televi-sion that Obama was a friend of antisemites. The now-famous “Joe the Plumber” has said that an Obama presidency would mean “death to Israel”. The paranoid strain in American politics, long present, has made Obama’s task of uniting the country if he is elected that much harder.
Indeed, there are many signs that if Obama wins, the strategy of the Republican right will be to treat him as potentially treasonous until proven otherwise. Any outreach Obama might make to, say, elements in the Iranian regime will not be interpreted as hardheaded diplomacy, but as proof that Obama is in covert league with America’s enemies. Any withdrawal from Iraq could lead to a “stab-in-the-back” narrative that blames treacherous leftist elites for waving “the white flag of surrender” and betraying good American soldiers.
Many on the far right have advanced themes that suggest that the election is being stolen by Democrats and their allies by fraudulently registering black and Hispanic voters. McCain himself asserted in the final debate that what might be at stake is the biggest voter fraud in the history of American politics – an absurd hyperbole, but one deployed aggressively nonetheless. These are dangerous waters to swim in, but, sadly, the fringes of the far right have come close to defining the Republican party.
If Obama wins big, moreover, he could face bigger challenges than if he wins by a conventional margin. The devastated congressional right will be reduced to those in the safest seats with the most ideological bent. Just like the Tories after 1997, the Republicans could marinate in their own denial before they wake up and move painfully back to the centre.
Already, some are positioning Palin to be the standard-bearer for the next wave of Republicanism – a potent combination of populist antielitism and religious zeal. If you consider how the right responded to Bill Clinton’s election in 1992, and then add race to the mix, the prospect for calm ahead is slight.
Equally, too big a Democratic majority in the House and Senate could make Obama vulnerable to left-liberal hubris and conservative Democrat revolt. Few economists recommend fiscal austerity in the current downturn, but there is a risk of empowered Democratic power brokers on Capitol Hill overcompensating and initiating a binge of favoured spending projects in their own constituencies.
Any spending increase by Obama will be reliably greeted by a chorus of “socialism!” from the opposition (an opposition that said almost nothing while Bush increased federal spending by a bigger margin than any president since FDR) and any tax increases in a recession will prompt overwhelming caterwauling as a further drag on the economy.
My bet is that his tax rises will be more modest than advertised. By the time Clin-ton became president, remember, the recession of the early 1990s was almost over. When Obama becomes president, it will just be beginning.
On climate change, the task will be made much harder by that depression – as Obama’s cap-and-trade scheme would indisputably hurt business. On immigration, Obama would easily be able to pass a bill favoured by Bush, but also face a nasty backlash from the right and maybe even in his own party.
Obama may even be leery of his signature healthcare reform, remembering what happened to the Clintons in 1993. And the price of a big majority will be a lot of Democrats in marginal seats in normally Republican states who may well bolt if Obama gets too liberal.
Managing all of this will not be easy. And Obama will also have to deal with Democrat-run congressional committees finally getting a thorough look at what the Bush administration has been up to in the past eight years.
Among the issues that will be impossible to avoid will be evidence of war crimes and torture authorised by the outgoing president and his closest aides. Prosecu-tion? A truth and reconciliation commission on the South African or Chilean mod-els? All we can say with certainty is that these are difficult questions in which maintaining the political centre will be extremely hard.
Equally, if Obama is too cautious and too careful not to divide the country, he could end up squandering his own mandate. He has potential enemies to the left of him as well as the right. If he is elected, he will cap a generation of rising anger and frustration on the Democratic left. From their point of view, the Clintons were semi-Republicans in the 1990s, the 2000 election was stolen and the 2004 election was an artefact of warmongering and religious pandering. They do not just want to win. They want to get even. They have a head of steam that could scald Obama as powerfully in office as it has helped propel him to the verge of the presidency.
There is also an enormous liability for Obama in the great hopes he has inspired. The reason for the wave of optimism behind him – just look at the massive crowds across the country this past year – is almost entirely due to the profound national demoralisation of the recent past. Iraq and Afghanistan, Katrina and the financial meltdown, torture and religious extremism: all these have led many Americans to the brink of despair about their own country. A historically unprecedented number of Americans believe their country is on the wrong track and view Obama as the vehicle to repair it.
Among the most enthusiastic Obama supporters, there are tinges of hero worship and aspirations beyond anything any human being can deliver. And the hostility born of dashed expectations is always the worst. People expecting a messiah will at some point be forced to realise they have merely elected a president.
No president will be able to wave the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan away with some kind of magic wand – there are few good options in either conflict, and many potential perils. No president will be able to end a recession with deep roots or alter market confidence in a single speech.
No president can change the Earth’s climate in four or eight years. And when Obama’s limitations emerge, as they will, there is a danger that the powerful expectations of his young base may turn to tears. This is always the risk with political “movements”. They conjure up utopias that can simply never happen.
Between the roiling and increasingly bitter rapids on the right and the left, can Obama maintain a steady course? We cannot know, of course. But the evidence of the past year is encouraging. What has been truly amazing is the preternatural calm and moderation Obama has shown throughout this volatile and emotional campaign. He has managed to get to the brink of the White House by beating some of the most formidable political machines in America – the Clintons and the Roves – without intensifying the conflict or polarising the country himself.
He seems able to absorb these currents without further disturbing them. Of course, this is much harder in office than in opposition. In office, you have to make decisions that delineate winners and losers rather than make speeches onto which everyone can project their interests. But Obama seems unafraid of his enemies, undeterred by his rivals, and able somehow to stay healthy and cheerful.
His temperamental edge is complemented by his organisational and managerial skills. The most seasoned political observers have been struck by the meticulous professionalism of his campaign; and there has never been a fundraising machine as innovative or as successful as his in the history of American politics.
Moreover, he has put himself out there in the most Republican of Republican states. He looks competitive not only in usually Republican Virginia, but also Ohio, Colorado, Montana, New Mexico, Indiana and even Georgia. In one of the more surre-al moments of last week, it looked as if the Obama campaign was considering a serious last-minute effort in Arizona, McCain’s home state.
My own view is that Obama is a midwest-ern centrist in his gut. He is much more like the Clintons substantively than either he or the Clintons would care to admit. The right’s biggest mistake in this campaign has been to believe that Obama is a closet radical and that if they could expose that, they would win. Although Obama is a product of his generation and of academia, his proximity to the intellectual left does not seem to have affected his policies.
His healthcare plan is less leftist than the Republican Mitt Romney’s in Massachu-setts. His proposals cut taxes for 90% of Americans. His climate change proposals are tediously conventional (too conventional to my mind). His instincts on foreign policy are more George H W Bush than George W Bush, which is to say he’s a pragmatic empiricist. If I were to bet on one appointment that Obama will make to his cabinet, it would be keeping Robert Gates, the defence secretary, at the Pentagon.
He is a strange liberal who seems to get along famously with conservatives. And he has now run up quite a roster of conservative endorsements, from Colin Powell to Francis Fukuyama. This is partly why a historical perspective on Obama does indeed return to the figure of Lincoln and the trau-ma of the 1860s.
In the middle of an unbridgeable divide, Lincoln kept calm. He inherited a much more divided country, of course. Lincoln did not even campaign in most of the southern states – he was not even on the ballot in most of them. By the time he was elected, many of them had already seceded. But Lincoln’s dedication to the cause of abolishing slavery was matched by a moderate demeanour and an extreme aversion to political polarisation.
Lincoln famously staffed his cabinet with what the historian Doris Kearns Good-win has called a “team of rivals”. Think of the way in which Obama handled the Clintons. He gave them just enough rope to hang themselves but managed to avoid a real breach. Last week Obama was jointly campaigning with Bill and comparing his economic proposals to Clinton’s in 1992.
That is a unifying skill Lincoln had and Obama will need. Obama’s capacity to pacify his enemies and organise his friends is his most telling characteristic. It should not be mistaken for softness. There is steel behind the velvet. But the velvet is really smooth and comfy.
Obama will also have something Lincoln never had. He will be in his DNA the visible incarnation of a wound that dates to America’s beginnings. If he is elected president, there will be a healing of some sort deep in the country’s psyche. That act will be a catalyst for unknowable change in America and in America’s role in the world. We can and should focus on his challenges, on the divisions still festering in America, on economic crisis and military quagmires. But what Obama appeals to is what Reagan appealed to: an American optimism that problems can be solved and divisions can be overcome.
In the coming week, if he is elected, we would be wise to resist euphoria or sentiment. But we would be wilfully blind not to sense the gravity and potential of the moment as well. We could have the first black president, with a congressional majority of a size not seen since Lyndon Johnson. We could see a landslide among the young. We could see an unprecedented African-American turnout – a moment when black Americans actively take ownership for the first time of the society in which they have always been such an integral part.
We simply do not know what new realities this moment could unleash. What we do know is that this is history – epic, deep, momentous history.
Let us keep our heads. But let us not numb our hearts. Somewhere in a Burkean idyll, countless Americans who lived before us, the souls of so many black folk and white folk across the centuries, are watching. What would Washington have said? How could Lincoln believe it? How amazed would Martin Luther King be?
We are indeed on the verge of something that seems even more incredible the closer it gets, something more than a mere election. This is America, after all. It is a place that has seen great cruelty and hardship in its time. But it is also a place that yearns to believe naively in mornings rather than evenings, that cherishes dawns over dusks, that is not embarrassed by its own sense of destiny. In this unlikely mixed-race figure of Barack Obama, we will for a brief moment perhaps see a nation reimagined and a world of possibilities open up. For a brief moment at least.
As they have learnt to say in some of the most blighted parts of the world at some of the most desperate times: know hope.

It's time; From The Economist

America should take a chance and make Barack Obama the next leader of the free world
IT IS impossible to forecast how important any presidency will be. Back in 2000 America stood tall as the undisputed superpower, at peace with a generally admiring world. The main argument was over what to do with the federal government’s huge budget surplus. Nobody foresaw the seismic events of the next eight years. When Americans go to the polls next week the mood will be very different. The United States is unhappy, divided and foundering both at home and abroad. Its self-belief and values are under attack.
For all the shortcomings of the campaign, both John McCain and Barack Obama offer hope of national redemption. Now America has to choose between them. The Economist does not have a vote, but if it did, it would cast it for Mr Obama. We do so wholeheartedly: the Democratic candidate has clearly shown that he offers the better chance of restoring America’s self-confidence. But we acknowledge it is a gamble. Given Mr Obama’s inexperience, the lack of clarity about some of his beliefs and the prospect of a stridently Democratic Congress, voting for him is a risk. Yet it is one America should take, given the steep road ahead.
Thinking about 2009 and 2017
The immediate focus, which has dominated the campaign, looks daunting enough: repairing America’s economy and its international reputation. The financial crisis is far from finished. The United States is at the start of a painful recession. Some form of further fiscal stimulus is needed (see article), though estimates of the budget deficit next year already spiral above $1 trillion. Some 50m Americans have negligible health-care cover. Abroad, even though troops are dying in two countries, the cack-handed way in which George Bush has prosecuted his war on terror has left America less feared by its enemies and less admired by its friends than it once was.
Yet there are also longer-term challenges, worth stressing if only because they have been so ignored on the campaign. Jump forward to 2017, when the next president will hope to relinquish office. A combination of demography and the rising costs of America’s huge entitlement programmes—Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid—will be starting to bankrupt the country (see article). Abroad a greater task is already evident: welding the new emerging powers to the West. That is not just a matter of handling the rise of India and China, drawing them into global efforts, such as curbs on climate change; it means reselling economic and political freedom to a world that too quickly associates American capitalism with Lehman Brothers and American justice with Guantánamo Bay. This will take patience, fortitude, salesmanship and strategy.
At the beginning of this election year, there were strong arguments against putting another Republican in the White House. A spell in opposition seemed apt punishment for the incompetence, cronyism and extremism of the Bush presidency. Conservative America also needs to recover its vim. Somehow Ronald Reagan’s party of western individualism and limited government has ended up not just increasing the size of the state but turning it into a tool of southern-fried moralism.
The selection of Mr McCain as the Republicans’ candidate was a powerful reason to reconsider. Mr McCain has his faults: he is an instinctive politician, quick to judge and with a sharp temper. And his age has long been a concern (how many global companies in distress would bring in a new 72-year-old boss?). Yet he has bravely taken unpopular positions—for free trade, immigration reform, the surge in Iraq, tackling climate change and campaign-finance reform. A western Republican in the Reagan mould, he has a long record of working with both Democrats and America’s allies.
If only the real John McCain had been running
That, however, was Senator McCain; the Candidate McCain of the past six months has too often seemed the victim of political sorcery, his good features magically inverted, his bad ones exaggerated. The fiscal conservative who once tackled Mr Bush over his unaffordable tax cuts now proposes not just to keep the cuts, but to deepen them. The man who denounced the religious right as “agents of intolerance” now embraces theocratic culture warriors. The campaigner against ethanol subsidies (who had a better record on global warming than most Democrats) came out in favour of a petrol-tax holiday. It has not all disappeared: his support for free trade has never wavered. Yet rather than heading towards the centre after he won the nomination, Mr McCain moved to the right.
Meanwhile his temperament, always perhaps his weak spot, has been found wanting. Sometimes the seat-of-the-pants method still works: his gut reaction over Georgia—to warn Russia off immediately—was the right one. Yet on the great issue of the campaign, the financial crisis, he has seemed all at sea, emitting panic and indecision. Mr McCain has never been particularly interested in economics, but, unlike Mr Obama, he has made little effort to catch up or to bring in good advisers (Doug Holtz-Eakin being the impressive exception).
The choice of Sarah Palin epitomised the sloppiness. It is not just that she is an unconvincing stand-in, nor even that she seems to have been chosen partly for her views on divisive social issues, notably abortion. Mr McCain made his most important appointment having met her just twice.
Ironically, given that he first won over so many independents by speaking his mind, the case for Mr McCain comes down to a piece of artifice: vote for him on the assumption that he does not believe a word of what he has been saying. Once he reaches the White House, runs this argument, he will put Mrs Palin back in her box, throw away his unrealistic tax plan and begin negotiations with the Democratic Congress. That is plausible; but it is a long way from the convincing case that Mr McCain could have made. Had he become president in 2000 instead of Mr Bush, the world might have had fewer problems. But this time it is beset by problems, and Mr McCain has not proved that he knows how to deal with them.
Is Mr Obama any better? Most of the hoopla about him has been about what he is, rather than what he would do. His identity is not as irrelevant as it sounds. Merely by becoming president, he would dispel many of the myths built up about America: it would be far harder for the spreaders of hate in the Islamic world to denounce the Great Satan if it were led by a black man whose middle name is Hussein; and far harder for autocrats around the world to claim that American democracy is a sham. America’s allies would rally to him: the global electoral college on our website shows a landslide in his favour. At home he would salve, if not close, the ugly racial wound left by America’s history and lessen the tendency of American blacks to blame all their problems on racism.
So Mr Obama’s star quality will be useful to him as president. But that alone is not enough to earn him the job. Charisma will not fix Medicare nor deal with Iran. Can he govern well? Two doubts present themselves: his lack of executive experience; and the suspicion that he is too far to the left.
There is no getting around the fact that Mr Obama’s résumé is thin for the world’s biggest job. But the exceptionally assured way in which he has run his campaign is a considerable comfort. It is not just that he has more than held his own against Mr McCain in the debates. A man who started with no money and few supporters has out-thought, out-organised and out-fought the two mightiest machines in American politics—the Clintons and the conservative right.
Political fire, far from rattling Mr Obama, seems to bring out the best in him: the furore about his (admittedly ghastly) preacher prompted one of the most thoughtful speeches of the campaign. On the financial crisis his performance has been as assured as Mr McCain’s has been febrile. He seems a quick learner and has built up an impressive team of advisers, drawing in seasoned hands like Paul Volcker, Robert Rubin and Larry Summers. Of course, Mr Obama will make mistakes; but this is a man who listens, learns and manages well.
It is hard too nowadays to depict him as soft when it comes to dealing with America’s enemies. Part of Mr Obama’s original appeal to the Democratic left was his keenness to get American troops out of Iraq; but since the primaries he has moved to the centre, pragmatically saying the troops will leave only when the conditions are right. His determination to focus American power on Afghanistan, Pakistan and proliferation was prescient. He is keener to talk to Iran than Mr McCain is— but that makes sense, providing certain conditions are met.
Our main doubts about Mr Obama have to do with the damage a muddle-headed Democratic Congress might try to do to the economy. Despite the protectionist rhetoric that still sometimes seeps into his speeches, Mr Obama would not sponsor a China-bashing bill. But what happens if one appears out of Congress? Worryingly, he has a poor record of defying his party’s baronies, especially the unions. His advisers insist that Mr Obama is too clever to usher in a new age of over-regulation, that he will stop such nonsense getting out of Congress, that he is a political chameleon who would move to the centre in Washington. But the risk remains that on economic matters the centre that Mr Obama moves to would be that of his party, not that of the country as a whole.
He has earned it
So Mr Obama in that respect is a gamble. But the same goes for Mr McCain on at least as many counts, not least the possibility of President Palin. And this cannot be another election where the choice is based merely on fear. In terms of painting a brighter future for America and the world, Mr Obama has produced the more compelling and detailed portrait. He has campaigned with more style, intelligence and discipline than his opponent. Whether he can fulfil his immense potential remains to be seen. But Mr Obama deserves the presidency.

Starbucks Blues
By liza.featherstone

(Slate)
Fall is pumpkin-latte season for those who can still afford to indulge, but for Starbucks [1] workers, it's been a season of discontent. The coffee giant has recently responded to hard times with scheduling changes that are likely to inflict misery on its employees. These policies seem sharply at odds with Starbucks' reputation for social responsibility but make sense in the context of the company's record as an employer. Curiously, the coffee retailer's benevolent image seems most fragile at the moment that the company's best days seem to be receding into the past.
The store atmosphere remains suffused with NPR-style high-mindedness. A fact sheet from Good magazine [2] about the U.S. economy's woes is prominently displayed, as is Helene Cooper's memoir about her childhood in Liberia. So it's fitting that when Starbucks introduced a new human-resources strategy two weeks ago, a new company manual for managers—obtained and shared with TBM by the Starbucks Workers Union, a group of employees pressing for better wages and working conditions—explained the change in lofty terms, insisting that it was "a philosophy, not a program."
This new "philosophy" is called "Optimal Scheduling," and it requires that "partners" (Starbucks-speak for employees) must dramatically increase their own flexibility. If they'd like to work full time, they must be available to work 70 percent of open store hours. (For a Starbucks open 16 hours a day, as is typical, this means 80.5 hours per week.) Many Starbucks employees say they want to work more hours; the new system could make it possible for those people to work more by downsizing those who can't or don't want to. Starbucks spokeswoman Tara Darrow says optimal scheduling is "a win-win for our customers and partners" that will lead to "more stable scheduling and more satisfied partners."
Liberte Locke, a New York City barista, is not one of those "satisfied partners." Why? Because, although she has opened up her entire day to Starbucks (from 4:15 a.m. to 11 p.m.), the company is "not guaranteeing any hours, not a single one." She's right: The fact that no hours are guaranteed, even for workers classified as "full time," is underscored repeatedly in the company managers' manual. The company is demanding almost all their time and, Locke says, "We are getting nothing in return." Optimal scheduling amounts to a permanent booty call; only the most boorish boyfriend would insist on such conditions.
The new availability requirement could make it almost impossible for employees to have a second job, as many low-wage workers must in order to make ends meet. Erik Forman, who works at Starbucks in the Twin Cities' Mall of America, says one of his fellow baristas opens McDonald's and closes Starbucks every day. Another co-worker opens Starbucks and closes IKEA. As Liberte Locke points out, Starbucks "doesn't pay enough to be someone's livelihood," especially with no hours guaranteed.
Being available 80.5 hours a week, Forman points out, will also be hard on "a student, a mother, or anyone who does anything besides working." Workers who can't make themselves available for the required number of hours will, within six months, lose their jobs. "It's another way for [Starbucks] to thin the herd," says Locke, "to have layoffs without calling them layoffs."
True, and perhaps to be expected. Starbucks' business isn't booming. With consumer sentiment ranging from grim to terrified [3], who's bold enough to pay $5 for coffee? Just stepping into this emporium of high-priced foamy drinks can feel like a time capsule journey back to prerecession days. Starbucks' profits have taken a beating, and its stock price has been steadily slipping over the past year. Milk inflation has been disastrous for the company (because, let's face it, Starbucks' drinks are mostly milk). That, along with rising gas costs, led the company to raise its own prices—already prohibitive to increasingly cost-conscious consumers—this summer. Store traffic is down for the first time since the company began measuring it.
Under such circumstances, it's not unusual for a company to cut costs (though it doesn't have to fall mostly on employees). When Starbucks closed 600 stores this summer, many baristas lost their jobs, but, as spokeswoman Tara Darrow points out, the company was able to place others in nearby stores. In fairness to Starbucks, its low-wage workers have not borne the pain alone: According to Darrow, about 1,000 jobs were axed at company headquarters in July.
Still, optimal scheduling is only one installment in an epic series of workforce management missteps for Starbucks. Like Wal-Mart [4], the company has an extensive union-busting operation and has been the target of numerous National Labor Relations Board complaints over unlawful violations of workers' rights. In early October, Starbucks was forced to settle the case of Mall of America barista Erik Forman (quoted above), who was fired for talking with co-workers about managers' apparent efforts to fire him for union organizing. It is illegal to dismiss workers for this, and after local publicity and citywide store pickets, Starbucks invited Forman back to work. The company also faces trial in Grand Rapids, Mich., for firing a barista for union activity and is awaiting a trial verdict in New York City on 30 counts of violating employees' union organizing rights. Earlier this year, a California court ordered the company to pay baristas more than $100 million for tips illegally shared with shift supervisors.
Though it's easy and fun to mock Starbucks' self-righteous hype, many take it seriously. In corporate-responsibility classes in business school, the Starbucks case studies provide a beacon of hope for the ethically concerned minority. In such discussions, Starbucks is always showcased as a company that provides suppliers with positive incentives to grow coffee in ways that are better for the environment, even throwing some labor standards into the mix. But Starbucks' good reputation on supply-chain practices has deflected attention from its treatment of baristas and even helped nourish the perception that it's a decent employer. Starbucks has repeatedly landed on Fortune magazine's "Best Companies to Work For" list [5]. While Wal-Mart is constantly criticized—including by this writer—for stingy health-insurance policies, Starbucks is often praised for offering any health insurance at all [6]. Yet Starbucks insures an even lower percentage of its work force than Wal-Mart does: 40.9 percent, as calculated from figures the company disclosed to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer last year [7] (about 47 percent of Wal-Mart workers have company insurance). Spokeswoman Tara Darrow deflected TBM's questions about the percentage of employees covered by company insurance, preferring to emphasize that 88 percent of the workers are covered by some form of insurance—which could be Medicaid, or a parent's or spouse's plan—and that 65 percent of "eligible" employees are covered by the company plan.
Unlike Wal-Mart, Starbucks rarely draws criticism for its wages. Yet baristas' wages are similar to those earned by Wal-Mart workers and in some markets may even be lower: about $7 to $9 an hour. (Starbucks wouldn't offer any data on its wages, but the Starbucks Workers Union provided TBM with an internal company document from 2005, which shows the highest and lowest wage in each location. It's unlikely that Starbucks workers' wages have increased much in the last three years, since hardly anyone's have.)
There's always been some media bias in favor of Starbucks, which is perhaps why the company's worst practices have drawn so little attention. Unlike frumpy, red-state Wal-Mart, Starbucks, with its jazz compilations and recycled napkins, is our kind of company. Yet when it comes to mistreatment of employees, says labor activist and former Starbucks barista Daniel Gross (no relation to the Slate writer of the same name), who was fired from the company for union organizing, "Every retailer—McDonald's, Wal-Mart—does the same things. The difference is that Starbucks has really succeeded in convincing people that it's better."
Perhaps this is about to change. Everyone's feeling cranky, and Starbucks' self-love and feel-good branding seem as ill-fitting to our current cultural moment as its prices. The company shouldn't be surprised if recession brings more criticism along with so many other woes.
© 2008 Washington Post.Newsweek

fighting words
Sarah Palin's War on Science
The GOP ticket's appalling contempt for knowledge and learning.

By Christopher Hitchens
In an election that has been fought on an astoundingly low cultural and intellectual level, with both candidates pretending that tax cuts can go like peaches and cream with the staggering new levels of federal deficit, and paltry charges being traded in petty ways, and with Joe the Plumber becoming the emblematic stupidity of the campaign, it didn't seem possible that things could go any lower or get any dumber. But they did last Friday, when, at a speech in Pittsburgh, Gov. Sarah Palin denounced wasteful expenditure on fruit-fly research, adding for good xenophobic and anti-elitist measure that some of this research took place "in Paris, France" and winding up with a folksy "I kid you not."
It was in 1933 that Thomas Hunt Morgan won a Nobel Prize for showing that genes are passed on by way of chromosomes. The experimental creature that he employed in the making of this great discovery was the Drosophila melanogaster, or fruit fly. Scientists of various sorts continue to find it a very useful resource, since it can be easily and plentifully "cultured" in a laboratory, has a very short generation time, and displays a great variety of mutation. This makes it useful in studying disease, and since Gov. Palin was in Pittsburgh to talk about her signature "issue" of disability and special needs, she might even have had some researcher tell her that there is a Drosophila-based center for research into autism at the University of North Carolina. The fruit fly can also be a menace to American agriculture, so any financing of research into its habits and mutations is money well-spent. It's especially ridiculous and unfortunate that the governor chose to make such a fool of herself in Pittsburgh, a great city that remade itself after the decline of coal and steel into a center of high-tech medical research.
In this case, it could be argued, Palin was not just being a fool in her own right but was following a demagogic lead set by the man who appointed her as his running mate. Sen. John McCain has made repeated use of an anti-waste and anti-pork ad (several times repeated and elaborated in his increasingly witless speeches) in which the expenditure of $3 million to study the DNA of grizzly bears in Montana was derided as "unbelievable." As an excellent article in the Feb. 8, 2008, Scientific American pointed out, there is no way to enforce the Endangered Species Act without getting some sort of estimate of numbers, and the best way of tracking and tracing the elusive grizzly is by setting up barbed-wire hair-snagging stations that painlessly take samples from the bears as they lumber by and then running the DNA samples through a laboratory. The cost is almost trivial compared with the importance of understanding this species, and I dare say the project will yield results in the measurement of other animal populations as well, but all McCain could do was be flippant and say that he wondered whether it was a "paternity" or "criminal" issue that the Fish and Wildlife Service was investigating. (Perhaps those really are the only things that he associates in his mind with DNA.)
With Palin, however, the contempt for science may be something a little more sinister than the bluff, empty-headed plain-man's philistinism of McCain. We never get a chance to ask her in detail about these things, but she is known to favor the teaching of creationism in schools (smuggling this crazy idea through customs in the innocent disguise of "teaching the argument," as if there was an argument), and so it is at least probable that she believes all creatures from humans to fruit flies were created just as they are now. This would make DNA or any other kind of research pointless, whether conducted in Paris or not. Projects such as sequencing the DNA of the flu virus, the better to inoculate against it, would not need to be funded. We could all expire happily in the name of God. Gov. Palin also says that she doesn't think humans are responsible for global warming; again, one would like to ask her whether, like some of her co-religionists, she is a "premillenial dispensationalist"—in other words, someone who believes that there is no point in protecting and preserving the natural world, since the end of days will soon be upon us.
Videos taken in the Assembly of God church in Wasilla, Alaska, which she used to attend, show her nodding as a preacher says that Alaska will be "one of the refuge states in the Last Days." For the uninitiated, this is a reference to a crackpot belief, widely held among those who brood on the "End Times," that some parts of the world will end at different times from others, and Alaska will be a big draw as the heavens darken on account of its wide open spaces. An article by Laurie Goodstein in the New York Times gives further gruesome details of the extreme Pentecostalism with which Palin has been associated in the past (perhaps moderating herself, at least in public, as a political career became more attractive). High points, also available on YouTube, show her being "anointed" by an African bishop who claims to cast out witches. The term used in the trade for this hysterical superstitious nonsense is "spiritual warfare," in which true Christian soldiers are trained to fight demons. Palin has spoken at "spiritual warfare" events as recently as June. And only last week the chiller from Wasilla spoke of "prayer warriors" in a radio interview with James Dobson of Focus on the Family, who said that he and his lovely wife, Shirley, had convened a prayer meeting to beseech that "God's perfect will be done on Nov. 4."
This is what the Republican Party has done to us this year: It has placed within reach of the Oval Office a woman who is a religious fanatic and a proud, boastful ignoramus. Those who despise science and learning are not anti-elitist. They are morally and intellectually slothful people who are secretly envious of the educated and the cultured. And those who prate of spiritual warfare and demons are not just "people of faith" but theocratic bullies. On Nov. 4, anyone who cares for the Constitution has a clear duty to repudiate this wickedness and stupidity.Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and the author of God Is Not Great.
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost

Democrats' gloom deepens

By: Roger Simon (Politico)
The Democrats are poised on the brink of victory. And they cannot stand it. The news is too good. Something has to go wrong. On Saturday, Charlie Cook, an independent analyst and author of the Cook Report, wrote: “This election isn’t over, but it is looking very bad for Republicans — and seems to be getting worse.” This plunged the Democrats into a deep gloom. Good news is always bad news for them. On Monday, CNN’s John King announced: “Most top [people] in the McCain campaign now believe New Mexico and Iowa are gone, that Barack Obama will win New Mexico and Iowa. They are now off the dream list of the McCain campaign. More interestingly, most top people inside the McCain campaign think Colorado is gone.” Democratic pessimism deepened when, that same day, Chris Cillizza and Shailagh Murray wrote in The Washington Post: “In the 13 battleground states that require voters to register by party, there are nearly 1.5 million more Democrats than at this time in 2004. The comparable Republican numbers, by contrast, have fallen by 61,000 during that time. Registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans by more than 3.3 million in these same 13 battleground states, roughly double the edge — 1.8 million — they enjoyed over the GOP four years ago.” Can it get worse for the Democrats? Yes! On Tuesday, The Associated Press wrote: “Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama spent $87.5 million last month and began October with nearly $134 million in the bank. The numbers illustrate his vast financial advantage over John McCain, his Republican rival, in the final stretch of the contest. McCain ended September with $47 million in the bank.” The story went on to note that Obama “spent $65 million in advertising in September to McCain’s $22 million. In October, he has outspent McCain 4-to-1 in advertising.” Awful news. Obama has a money problem. And you know what it is? He might run out of time to spend all the money he has! Election Day might come and go before Obama can spend the $5 million a day he is now raising. (If this does happen, I suggest he borrow a page from Oprah and buy everyone in America a Pontiac. Just as a gesture.) Obama himself has reacted to the dismal drumbeat of good news. At a fundraising concert in Manhattan last Thursday featuring Bruce Springsteen and Billy Joel, Obama got up and said: “Don’t underestimate the capacity of Democrats to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Don’t underestimate our ability to screw it up.” Which is the prevailing mood in the top echelons of the Democratic Party right now. The McCain campaign cannot possibly be as hapless as it looks, party leaders feel. It is lulling the Democrats into complacency. The Republicans have to have an October surprise, because the Republicans always have an October surprise.

Besides, the robocalls could work. Never underestimate the power of the robocalls. Because people really like getting robocalls, right? You are at home, it is dinnertime (which is when they call you because they figure you are at home then), and you are either trying to relax or get the kids fed, and the phone rings and it is this recorded voice saying: “I’m calling for John McCain and the RNC because you need to know that Barack Obama has worked with domestic terrorist Bill Ayers.” And does that make you feel more or less positive about John McCain? Does it persuade you that McCain has a plan to save the economy? Or to help you pay your mortgage? Or that he has a steady hand on the tiller? For the robocalls to be effective, the Republicans would need Bill Ayers to plant bombs today and not when Barack Obama was 8 years old. They need Ayers to plant bombs in key states right now with stickers on them that say: “I am Barack Obama, and I endorse this bomb.” But McCain may have found his October surprise after all. In Bensalem, Pa., on Tuesday, McCain said: “Now, I’m not dumb enough to get mixed up in a World Series between swing states. But I think I may have detected a little pattern with Sen. Obama. It’s pretty simple, really. When he’s campaigning in Philadelphia, he roots for the Phillies, and when he’s campaigning in Tampa Bay, he ‘shows love’ to the Rays.” And rumors are now flying that McCain has proof that when Obama was in the second grade he once ate paste. The Democrats are fearful of all this. The Democrats are always fearful. “We have been on the precipice of victory before,” Dan Pfeiffer, an Obama spokesman, told me. “You have never seen a more superstitious campaign than ours. We do not talk about victory.” Talk about it, no. Plan for it, yes.
© 2008 Capitol News Company, LLC