In his New York Times opinion column last Sunday, Frank Rich wrote about reactions to Obama’s victory the preceding Tuesday: “The festive scenes of liberation that Dick Cheney had once imagined for Iraq were finally taking place — in cities all over America.
“The post-Bush-Rove Republican Party is in the minority because it has driven away women, the young, suburbanites, black Americans, Latino-Americans, Asian-Americans, educated Americans, gay Americans and, increasingly, working-class Americans. Who’s left? The only states where the G.O.P. increased its percentage of the presidential vote relative to the Democrats were West Virginia, Tennessee, Louisiana and Arkansas. Even the North Carolina county where Palin expressed her delight at being in the ‘real America’ went for Obama by more than 18 percentage points.
“The actual real America is everywhere. It is the America that has been in shell shock since the aftermath of 9/11, when our government wielded a brutal attack by terrorists as a club to ratchet up our fears, betray our deepest constitutional values and turn Americans against one another in the name of ‘patriotism.’ What we started to remember the morning after Election Day was what we had forgotten over the past eight years, as our abusive relationship with the Bush administration and its press enablers dragged on: That’s not who we are.”
Michael Hirsh wrote for Newsweek: “. . . after nearly eight years of a president who could barely form a coherent sentence, much less a strategic thought . . . [w]hat Obama’s election means, above all, is that brains are back. Sense and pragmatism and the idea of considering-all-the-options are back. Studying one’s enemies and thinking through strategic problems are back. Cultural understanding is back. Yahooism and jingoism and junk science about global warming and shabby legal reasoning about torture are out. The national culture of flag-pin shallowness that guided our foreign policy is gone with the wind. And for this reason as much as any, perhaps I can renew my pride in being an American.”
Nicholas Kristoff wrote that Bush “adopted anti-intellectualism as administration policy, repeatedly rejecting expertise (from Middle East experts, climate scientists and reproductive health specialists). Mr. Bush is smart in the sense of remembering facts and faces, yet I can’t think of anybody I’ve ever interviewed who appeared so uninterested in ideas.”
Maureen Dowd wrote that “now we have the delicious irony that a white president from a patrician family, whose administration was so negligent about America’s poor and black citizens, was so incompetent that he helped elect the first black president.”