It will be an enormous challenge just to get the nation back to where it was before Mr. Bush, to begin to mend its image in the world and to restore its self-confidence and its self-respect. Doing all of that, and leading America forward, will require strength of will, character and intellect, sober judgment and a cool, steady hand.
Mr. Obama has those qualities in abundance. Watching him being tested in the campaign has long since erased the reservations that led us to endorse Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton in the Democratic primaries. He has drawn in legions of new voters with powerful messages of hope and possibility and calls for shared sacrifice and social responsibility.
Mr. McCain, whom we chose as the best Republican nominee in the primaries, has spent the last coins of his reputation for principle and sound judgment to placate the limitless demands and narrow vision of the far-right wing. His righteous fury at being driven out of the 2000 primaries on a racist tide aimed at his adopted daughter has been replaced by a zealous embrace of those same win-at-all-costs tactics and tacticians.
Imagine the uproar if Michelle Obama was revealed to have joined a black nationalist party whose founder preached armed secession from the United States and who enlisted the government of Iran in his cause? The Obama campaign would probably not have survived such an explosive revelation. Particularly if Barack Obama himself was videotaped giving the anti-American secessionists his wholehearted support just months ago.The petty attacks on Obama's character regarding the inconsequential meetings with William Ayers don't compare to the Palins' hatred for this country and its people. A hatred not based on their support for Alaskan independence, but rather on their belief that Americans are so gullible to believe their lies.
The larger Obama's margin in the popular vote becomes (and over the course of the past several weeks, he's been gaining a full a point on McCain roughly every three days) the less the relative positioning of the states matters. For John McCain to get back into this race, he is going to need some dramatic events to occur, and we don't know in which types of states such events might have a differential impact; something like an outbreak of hostilities in the Middle East could make a very different electoral footprint than new revelations about Barack Obama and William Ayers.What the electorate seems to be saying is that the attacks on Obama's character are failing. Voters are seeing through the McCain smokescreen and the Palin wall of incoherence. They appear to be deciding in ever greater numbers that it's time to put adults in charge of their government, leaving McCain/Palin to play dirty with the other playground brats.
