America Chooses a President

So it’s an election year. There doesn’t seem to be any doubt that people are more interested than usual. Voter turnout, especially on the Democratic side, is far greater than any previous year and I think there are a few obvious reason for this.

First, September 11th is still a primary driver. We learned on that day that the potential for disaster and tragedy is present on a daily basis and that there is virtually no way to insulate ourselves from this fact. Being wealthy, successful, intelligent, or well-liked won’t protect you. We saw it all happen in real time and we’ve had trouble sleeping ever since. It made us more aware of the fact that the world doesn’t end when we leave American soil. We learned we are actually vulnerable and that our lives are not predictable or certain. We care more now about issues.

But one of the most significant effects of the event was a decreased motivation to create and use our imaginations. Life seems much bigger than we are and and this has lead to the belief that real art can only be created by external forces, that art is life itself and that any attempt to deny this in favor of our own ideas will amount to hubris and little else. This is the second cause of this recent surge in political interest. Nothing else is going on. Movies and music have failed to stimulate us. Celebrities aren’t larger-than-life figures they way they have been in the past. Many of them are made on reality tv and we know full well that they’ll be forgotten in fifteen minutes. In the wake of this, we have used the Democratic primary to help pick up some of the slack.

Anyone who has tried to predict the outcomes of these state races has only wound up making a total fool of themselves. Virtually nothing has gone the way conventional wisdom would suggest. The most reasonable prediction at the start of these races would have been a selection of the candidates with the firmest hold on the Washington establishment, Hillary Clinton and John McCain. McCain’s national polling numbers did not support this at the start of the race but if we look back to 2004 we can see a similar set of circumstances in how John Kerry was able to turn things around and win his party’s nomination. The general idea is that polling numbers get swayed by media phenomena (Howard Dean, Rudy Guiliani) but when people have to actually pull a lever and choose a candidate, we flock right back to what is most familiar.

The Democratic race has violated some of these historical precedents. Momentum has swayed back and forth for both Obama and Clinton. It is rare that something as large and unwieldy as public opinion will find a way to change as many times as it has for these candidates during the last few months. After Obama lost the New Hampshire primary, he should have had an impossible time winning any state that did not have a heavy black population. But the exact opposite wound up being true.

In general, what one would expect, would be that the freshest, most progressive candidate would also be most favorable in the biggest states and on the coasts. But Obama, the dictionary definition of anti-establishment in a presidential arena, won very few of those states (and none of the biggest states, with the exception of Illinois). A tally of victories by the Obama campaign yields some very surprising results: Kansas, Nebraska, Idaho, North Dakota. How did Obama do so well in these Red states? Any answer to that question would have to include an acknowledgment that there is much more to this candidacy than meets the eye.