My Life In an Obama Administration, Part I

The political momentum has shifted back and forth in the seven weeks leading to November 4. The bump following the convention brought a sense of renewal to the Republican party—and suggested a promising conservative talk show career for Sarah Palin post-election. The deepening financial and housing crises, which reared its head for much of the past two years, finally exploded into a full-scale, global, economic meltdown. Independents and disaffected voters began to make up their minds.

And this week’s coup de grâce: former Secretary of State and army general Colin Powell’s endorsement of Barack Obama—which effectively undermined his long-time friend John McCain even as it boosted Obama’s foreign policy credentials and qualifications for becoming commander-in-chief. My husband and I were watching Powell’s interview on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday when we suddenly had an inkling that an important endorsement was about to be announced. "He has both style and substance. I think he is a transformational figure," summed up Powell’s influential blessing.

I suppose that now seems a good time to begin to speculate about my life and role at the dawn of the Obama era, but it’s still two weeks to go until the presidential election, and much can still go wrong. All I need do is recall what appeared to be a slam-dunk outcome a mere eight years ago when the winner of the popular vote by almost a half million votes lost the election by 5 electoral votes, with 1 abstention.

Al Gore obsessed about his loss at the 2005 Webby Awards. His pithy, 5-word haiku, acceptance speech? “Please don’t recount this vote.” Two years later, Gore’s winning of both the Nobel Peace Prize and an Academy Award as an eloquent voice on the dangers of global warming might have seemed compensation enough for his eked-out election loss (I truly empathize...I once lost an election for high school student body president by 1 vote and, like the good citizen I was and continue to be, I actually returned the extra ballot I was given! A few years later, I was elected in a landslide to the Board of Trustees of the largest university in the Ivy League and became a finalist for Glamour magazine’s Top Ten College Women in the country).

If a Republican were destined for the White House in 2000, that president should have been John McCain instead of George W. Bush. But McCain’s time has passed, and his series of questionable decisions and actions—from the improperly vetted elevation of Sarah Palin as his running mate, to his showcasing of “everyman” Joe the Plumber (an unlicensed plumber who owes back taxes)—to the puzzling photograph of him at the end of the last presidential debate (in a decidedly un-presidential caricature of the Hunchback of Notre Dame lumbering behind Barack Obama) simply washed away any benefit of the doubt that I and many other leftist-leaning, pro-military friends in Oklahoma may have extended to a war hero and former prisoner of war in Viet Nam.

What concerns me in 2008 is that the fate of the nation rests on 5 battleground states—Florida, Ohio, North Carolina, Colorado, and Nevada and their 76 electoral votes. The western states, Nevada and Colorado, have 5 and 9 electoral votes, respectively. A candidate could win 99% of the popular vote in Nevada, but in the winner-take-all electoral college only 5 votes would count toward electing the president. There has got to be a better formula for electing our president, which I will leave to policy wonks, elected officials, and high school debaters to sort out. In 1974-75, the national high school debate topic of the National Forensic League was the resolution, “Resolved: That the United States should significantly change the method of selecting presidential and vice-presidential candidates.” 34 years and 6 presidents later, no changes have been made.

You’d think a candidate with a 3-generation, family tradition of exceptional military service to the country would go down fighting and, indeed, McCain has refused to concede. But Barack Obama has shown himself to be a master of political warfare. His success in the 2008 campaign owes much to his lawyerly mindset that meticulously and thoroughly combs the margins—the fringes—for every possible advantage. If Obama had been a high school debater in 1974, he might have looked for ways to exploit the present system and optimize its loopholes. Who would have thought that the aggregate impact of caucuses and states with small electoral counts would make such a difference? This ingenious strategy explains how he won the Democratic Party nomination over an historic female candidate who was widely viewed as the inevitable Democratic nominee, and it is a strategy that has carried over to the general election.

This psychology of taking nothing for granted is the reason why Obama has remained steady and centered and why he will do nothing foolish in the remaining two weeks of the campaign. In his long-range planning, Obama has shown that he has been focused on the end game all along. Obama opted out of public funding so that he could continually renew his coffers by returning to small contributors. By tapping both traditional, major donors and small contributors reached in part through the internet, Obama has amassed a sizeable war chest, a record-shattering $150 million raised in September alone. Unlike John Kerry, who foolishly had $13 million left from his campaign 2004 and lost the election, Obama will raise and spend what he must to win the presidency.

What makes me hopeful about America’s future and the outcome of the election is the paradigm shift in younger voters who view Obama as an inspirational figure and transformative candidate. One of the students I mentor is an 18-year-old senior at a prep school near Boston voting in his first presidential election. Among many other accomplishments, Jerome Tse is the co-president of the Multicultural Students Association at the Noble & Greenough School. He and his classmates shared their thoughts on what this historic 2008 election means to them. The respondents of this Quick Poll are primarily, like myself, independent voters who may be affiliated with a political party; the lone Republican respondent plans to vote for Obama.

I’m posting Jerome’s reply in its entirety.

Jerome Tse, Senior at the Noble and Greenough High School:

1) Is this the first presidential election in which you will vote? Yes

2) Which candidate do you plan for vote for, and why? I plan to vote for Barack Obama for several reasons. I highly respect John McCain, but in my opinion, he has poor judgment and is too old. His policies are close to 95% the same as those of the Bush Administration, and everyone knows, this country is need of political and economic change. Barack Obama, despite not having as much experience as John McCain, has sound judgment, which will be especially important when it comes to making foreign policy decisions on America's situation in Iraq/Afghanistan and future threat, Iran. We need a leader whose first priority is negotiating peace with the enemy, but who is not afraid to take military action if needed. This is especially important regarding the Georgia/Russia conflict, which if handled over-aggressively, could lead to a third world war.

3) How do you plan to make your decision about whom to vote? What has made the difference in my selection for president were the candidates' motives for foreign policy. I like Barack Obama's opinion that we need to get out of Iraq and shift our focus on Afghanistan, the true center of terrorism, and negotiate with Pakistan, where bin Ladin is supposedly hiding. This kind of direct answer of what he is going to do attracted me, especially because his opinions are the same as mine in terms of foreign policy.

4) What concerns you most about the future? Barack Obama's inexperience. He has the right judgment, and I trust him for that. However, it is true that good leaders, especially presidents, need experience before they take over arguably the most powerful position in the world.

5) What is your political affiliation? Class year? Age? Republican, Senior, 18

6) Anything on which you care to elaborate or vent? John McCain could run into health problems in the near future, and if that were to be the case, Sarah Palin would take over as president. As a Republican, I respect Palin for what she has done as governor of Alaska, but she simply does not have the experience and has not proven to me yet that she has the right judgment when it comes to making economic, political, and military decisions for the United States.”