KCRW's Left, Right & Center --IT'S OVER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Now for the hard part for President-elect Obama. Let's hope that the leadership skills he showed in running his campaign help him to change politics as usual, perhaps put an end to the ugliness of the right-left split with a new kind of centrism that works. He certainly can talk inspirationally.

McCain was gracious and more articulate in his concession than in many of his campaign performances.

Americans get the chance that is denied people in places like Zimbabwe to replace the leadership when things go bad.

"In regard to attitude, America's conservatives could do worse than to be moved by those lines of Robert Blake from another place and another time on behalf of a similar sacred cause then not yet realized."

Another place and another time indeed.

Interesting comment by Bill Karwin got lost as the election happened.

"In a way I do feel sorry for George W. Bush. He seems like the hapless victim of circumstances. In a July 15 interview on Fresh Air, author Jane Mayer characterizes Bush and Cheney as almost overwhelmed by the responsibility to do everything they could to prevent another attack like 9/11. They focused on "raw" intelligence that hadn't been vetted, and so drove themselves into a sort of paranoia that made them unable to distinguish true threats from false threats.

Mayer says:

"It's not that they were a gang of criminals who were doing something wanton for fun, these are people who felt they were doing what was required and necessary to protect the country."

I think this is the most charitable interpretation possible of the Bush administration."

I don't know if anyone has any more emotional energy to spend on Bush, although he does have two and a half months in office. He did well in the first few days after 9/11, but otherwise definitely was not up to the job himself, did not select his underlings well and generally either had or did not exercise wise control over them. Furthermore they were too into power and behaved too much like Al Capone in the Untouchables movie, braining one of his underlings to show that he was still in charge. They had too little respect for freedom, democracy and due process. No one thought they were doing something wanton for fun or even a gang of criminals in the usual sense, although the laws of warmaking post-Nuremberg might make them criminals in an unusual sense.

Republicans are apparently looking at what happened and asking whether they were too conservative, not conservative enough or just had a lot of bad luck. We might say that they did not have cohesion amoung their constituency groups and the Democrats did, as happens when someone has been in power for a long time and bad things happen. We might add to this whether it was a good idea for Bush to run as a uniter, win by the narrowest of margins and then govern as a divider in the most conservative government in history. They may say they had 8 years in office to get their people into the courts and agencies, hand millions to the richest 1%, leave their successor with a crisis and huge debt to be responsible for and will be ready to come back in 2, 4 or 8 years. Or perhaps Obama will change politics so they will have to change their way of doing things.

In hindsight, Bush looked like a better candidate on paper than he turned out to be. He also had some good luck that Clinton's womanizing turned so many people off despite a trong economy, that all those votes in Florida didn't count and that the Supreme Court broke the tie for him. But despite all the campaigning we didn't really know what we would get, and more than we do with Obama. Sometimes it works out and sometimes it doesn't.

So far Bush has been pretty gracious, and hopefully won't leave office with any corrupt pardons, gratuitous sabotage and in your face orders to be rescinded, as happened when Clinton left. Nor have we seen the kind of hissing we saw from some conservatives when Clinton won. Many people want Obama to succeed in some way (even if they also have exaggerated fears that his views are extremely opposed to theirs), and hopefully those who didn't support him will recognize that the times are too perilous to try to make him fail. The "we are all Americans" thing that McCain said at his concession. A question is how to make that true.

Blankley remained fairly objective about the McCain campaign's chances and the uphill battle they faced, and how it was a result of the Bush Administration, which seemed decidedly off message for a Republican insider. (Compare to some of the Politico Arena commentators who never went beyond the mouthpiece message and were annoying to read.) On some of the small stuff he did defend the talking points.

I would really like to hear more about the conservative Republican renaissance that Blankley talked about in the last show. He said it would be more populist. Maybe more Palin-like? But the real heart of the Republicans has been the CEO and ownership level people, particularly in finance, and the Congresspeople who serve them, and the lobbyists who make it happen. Essentially the party of Delay, Armey, Boehner and Abramoff, plus all those mortgage CEOs like the guy Bush appointed ambassador to France. And the Enron people. And Halliburton and the oil companies. If these are the people whose greed and corruption got the Republicans in trouble, they are also the heart of the party. What would a more populist Republican party do with them?

It seems like the internal Republican argument so far has been whether they were too conservative or not conservative enough. But the Bush Administration has been the most conservative in history, and every mess they made is attributable to conservatism. Only the anti-government spending people and maybe the small libertarian wing have any criticism of what their agenda was, as opposed to how they did it. I'm sure we will hear from Blankley on this.

Why, other than tactical partisanship, are so many Republicans so down on Reid and Pelosi? Like everyone will understand that their names are curse words. What terrible have they done? Did they just plug their names into the niches they used to put Kennedy and the Clintons? Reid and Pelosi aren't inspirational leaders like Obama, but they aren't Gingrich or DeLay either.

I also respected McCain's concession speech, and noticed he was more sincere and a better candidate then than he was on the stump, maybe because you can't really be that sincere on the stump. (Do either of them really think there will be money for programs or tax cuts given the commitment to the wars and the bailout. But they can't go along with the questioners on that.)

McCain also did a decent effort with reigning in a lot of the negative stuff his side was doing, particularly in his presence. Since the presidential candidate himself generally must look presidential and leave the negative stuff to others, since no Presidential campaign is going to overtly play the race card (like Helms did that time in his Senate race) and particularly not in a race against an African American candidate where an overt race card would generate anxiety among a lot of moderates and independents, to say nothing of the anger of African Americans, and because subtle invocations of the race card were a constant undercurrent in the campaign (All the Obamassiah stuff, Jeremiah Wright, the Hussein stuff, ACORN, the FNMA guy who is black, the idea that loans to unqualified blacks caused the mortgage meltdown, to the extent that Ayers invokes memories of 60s era black radicals as cartooned on that New Yorker cover, and the accusation that the media was afraid to criticize Obama because of his race) I am not sure of how much of a pass to give McCain, and less to the people running his campaign, and certainly none to the swift boaters a deniable distance from the campaign. McCain may have as little real control of his campaign as Bush did over the guards at Abu Ghraib. But he did try harder.

McCain also did not demagogue the bailout vote, which is good. That would have been a politically dangerous thing for him to do since the Administration and the business interests were so much in favor of it, and everyone was saying the world economy would plunge into crisis if the bill didn't pass. The bailout was another no win situation for McCain. The Republicans in Congress were able to make an early no vote statement and get some pork in before going along, but McCain wouldn't have looked like a president or a maverick doing that. Plus he had committed to supporting it during that debate. The bailout bill was the Bush administration's party, and McCain was left looking unpresidential and insignificant if he went along and rash and demagogic if he didn't. And if Bush had given him a significant role, that would play to Obama's argument that he was a third Bush Administration in the making. Obama stayed out of the limelight, showed up for the vote, and supported the bill, which was the best road.