bryan stratton dot com

I know that Obama’s speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention got a lot of people buzzing about his presidential potential, but I wasn’t one of them. Honestly, I never got around to watching that speech until the very end of 2007, after he’d already announced his candidacy. And I didn’t really consider him to be a viable candidate until he won the Iowa caucus in January of 2008.

Going into Iowa, I had no dog in the hunt. I just wanted the strongest Democrat to come out of the primaries and hand the Republicans an epic ass-kicking in November. But Obama’s Iowa performance changed a couple of things for me.

First, his victory showed me that he was a viable candidate, which was absolutely essential for me to be able to take him seriously. I’ve been a Red Sox fan for as long as I can remember, which means I spent the first three decades of my life passionately supporting a lost cause. It’s a terrible thing to have most of your idealism beaten out of you by the time you’re thirty, but that’s what New England sports teams will do to you.

Second, as I listened to Obama’s victory speech in Iowa, I began to realize that I didn’t want to just root against the Republican party anymore, and I didn’t want to back another traditional candidate and go through the motions of another predictable campaign. We’d been down that road before, stuck with candidates whose primary selling point was their “electability.” I didn’t want to have to force myself to get excited about another safe candidate who wouldn’t turn off voters by showing any hint of their genuine personality. That was a strategy founded on playing defense, and the Republicans had proven themselves to be too formidable of an offensive force (in every sense of the word) for that to work.

I’ve always said that I only want three things in a president: I want him to be smarter than me, I want him to work harder than me, and I want him to be a better person than me. And after eight years of a president who was none of those things, I wasn’t willing to settle for someone who only had one or two of them going for him.

So when I saw Obama and listened to him speak, I realized that I’d found my guy: a self-made man from humble beginnings who knew what it was like to attend some of the most prestigious educational institutions in the world, and to have to deal with the crushing burden of debt that comes with it. He was cool under pressure, graceful in defeat, humble in victory, and he ran a tough campaign without resorting to demonizing his opponents, no matter how infrequently that courtesy was returned.

Most importantly, he spoke to us like we were adults, rather than oversimplifying every issue to a fundamental struggle between good and evil. The speech he gave on race in response to the Jeremiah Wright dust-up was exactly what I’d been waiting to hear a politician say for years. Not necessarily the content of it; I haven’t spent my guilty white liberal life flogging myself for the sins of my fathers. I’d just never seen a politician walk straight into a political minefield like that and speak plainly to the American public, gambling that we were smart and mature enough to understand that this was a conversation that we needed to have, and that it couldn’t be conducted in soundbites.

Contrast that to what we’ve had to deal with for the last decade and a half. Ever since the “Republican Revolution” of 1994 and the rise of right-wing radio and FOX News, political discourse has been dragged straight into the gutter and kicked senseless by the steel-toed boots of ignorance and bigotry. The Republican Party has become the party of selfishness, of intolerance, of small-mindedness, and of fear. Conservatism in this country has been reduced to declaring yourself the “Real America” and blaming all of your problems on somebody else: Muslims, gays, atheists, immigrants, Hollywood, the liberal elite. Bomb them, legislate against them, demonize them, deport them, waterboard them, shout them down, beat them up. But whatever you do, don’t ever turn a critical eye on yourself, or you’ll wind up on the outside of a group that sorts everything into two categories: with us, or against us.

The worst part about it is, it’s an infectious attitude. When I see “my side” being attacked with those methods, my first instinct is to respond in kind with hatred and intolerance. And, more often than not, I give into it and regret it later.

Which is why it’s important to me to have a president who’s a better person than I am, who doesn’t just hit back harder and louder, but doesn’t wind up getting walked all over either. I need to be reminded that you don’t always need to be a dick to get your way, and that maybe we’re all a little smarter and better-intentioned than I’ve been conditioned to believe.

I know that’s a lot to ask of anyone, and it’ll be a minor miracle if Obama doesn’t wind up utterly crushed under the weight of the expectations that have been placed upon him. But at this moment in history, I pretty much believe that anything’s possible, and I’m glad that we have a president-elect who’s a living, breathing embodiment of it.

Electoral Vote: 364-174, Obama/Biden

Popular Vote: 52-47, Obama/Biden (+1% third-party)

Senate: 59-40, Democrats (including two Dem-leaning Independents), with a run-off for Saxby Chambliss’ seat in GA

(All predictions pulled straight out of my overly hopeful ass.)