Iyow - in your own words

Now that all the excitement from the historic 2008 U.S. Presidential election has died down, Yuval Levin’s ‘The Meaning of Sarah Palin’ is the best analysis I’ve read yet on Sarah Palin and her symbolism, and why people reacted as they did to her. (And I’ve read a lot of them.)

It’s a fair and sober piece that understands the depth of Palin’s strengths – a stubborn belief in the importance of ethical government and the redeeming virtues of fair competition – as well as her (and more centrally, McCain’s) electorally fatal deficiency in painting a full vision of why their beliefs would make Americans better off: “Palin’s potent combination of cultural populism and social conservatism might provide the roadmap a Republican politician will need in the future to make headway against the Democratic tide. But that roadmap will only take that Republican politician so far. The rest of the journey requires the articulation of a broader vision for American families, American prosperity and freedom, and American security; a vision of conservatism, not only a nimbus of populism.”

That Obama was running against a Republican party whose reputation bore the worst generic poll numbers since the metric had been created in 1992, meant that presumption of advantage went to him, the challenger. Presumption here meaning what it does in high school debate terms, “all other things being equal, who wins the point?”

Of course, the stakes here were much higher than just the point. And the most articulate, clearest, graceful candidate won. But where did experience, risk and sacrifice for country, and bipartisan record land at the end? Is it possible for anyone to get past identity politics of any sort to “the pared-down truth,” or is it inevitable, desirable that all politics be personal? Perhaps the hardest part of this long odyssey of an election cycle was realizing that my life-long core political beliefs and passion for civil rights justice no longer easily fit in the family of my friends’ and community’s progressivism sliding into small-d democrat. Instead I had stepped unknowingly into the no-man’s land of Independent.

Most importantly though, the Change we were collectively looking for is done. And perhaps in the midst of economic chaos and tenuous international relations, history had decided that November 4, 2008 was the moment to take the long-delayed step towards black/white racial parity in the U.S. Life chooses its own timing, and we go forward.