Force Majeure
Conceding, McCain paid tribute to African-Americans, and honored Obama for--having defeated him.
Everyone is calling him gracious--on MSNBC, Keith Olbermann and Rep. John Lewis, for example. I suppose he was. What he couldn't bring himself to do: compliment Obama for the way he conducted himself; for any of his talents; for any ideas; for his character.
Beneath the velvet, it was faint praise. A bitter night for Sen. McCain, to be sure.
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What's the matter with these people calling McCain gracious? Have they forgotten the campaign he just finished running? I know we should be bigger than them, better perhaps, but I'm not ready to forgive him and let bygones be bygones, not for a long time. As far as I'm concerned, McCain has trashed any public reputation he might have had, and it's not coming back any time soon.
November 4, 2008 11:50 PM | Reply | Permalink
I know. I know. As I was listening to McCain I said to my friends, "where was this McCain during the campaign?"
November 5, 2008 1:26 AM | Reply | Permalink
And so let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire.
Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York.
Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania.
Let freedom ring from the snow-capped Rockies of Colorado.
Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California.
But not only that:
Let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia.
Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee.
Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi.
From every mountainside, let freedom ring.
And when this happens, when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual:
Free at last! Free at last!
Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!
Martin Luther King
Aug. 28, 1963
November 5, 2008 12:59 AM | Reply | Permalink
At least he shut up his audience -- sincerely I thought -- for booing President Obama. I don't hear anyone booing a team if they win a baseball game -- poor taste to say the least by McCain's backers.
November 5, 2008 1:20 AM | Reply | Permalink
Im waiting for McCain to tell Sarah's followers that "Okay folks.. Obama is not a Muslim, Obama is not a terrorist." Someone needs to, but Im sure the Republicans are making plans to use that even as I type.
And on the high note.. Congratulations to all of you and President Elect Obama :)
November 5, 2008 3:48 AM | Reply | Permalink
At least he shut up his audience -- sincerely I thought -- for booing President Obama. I don't hear anyone booing a team if they win a baseball game -- poor taste to say the least by McCain's backers.
Let's repeat 1,000 times. Being President of the U.S. is not like a baseball game. The analogy is wrong at 1 googol levels.
McCain called Barack Obama a terrorist, communist, Islamofascist, gay lover -- every epithet in the vocabulary he thought might stick.
McCain never apologized for this vile sewage. He approved all of it.
Todd Gitlin is right.
November 5, 2008 5:51 AM | Reply | Permalink
Agree with Gitlin.
The faces and the response of the all white crowd who listened to McCain in Phoenix reminded me of passages from a recent book about the Civil War and Sherman's 'March to the Sea', Southern Storm.
As Sherman's forces approached the capitol of Confederate Georgia in Milledgeville in November, 1864 the Augusta Daily Chronicle and Sentinel reported "The most predominant feature of the session is the introduction of bills to change the lines between counties....these bills are numerous and trifling" and had to do with landowners trying to switch counties to reduce their taxes (Joe the Plumber would be proud).
When the union Army rolled into the Georgia capitol their band playing Yankee Doodle (the legislators had hightailed it out of town) an Illinois soldier thought the remaining white residents "a blank looking set of people, never dreaming the hated Yankees would ever invade their noble domain." The United States is no longer a domain ruled only by McCain and Bush. McCain's supporters had that look of blank disbelief.
November 5, 2008 10:36 AM | Reply | Permalink
It's a line borrowed from another candidate in another election but it fits this one better: He sure shrinks on you, doesn't he?
Yes, this is not a baseball game. Shall we call it civil pollution, or does someone have a better word? Unfounded hatred doesn't always spontaneously decompose and vanish.
November 5, 2008 7:45 AM | Reply | Permalink
It only sounds like gracious because it's the first time McCain's been on TV in front of a crowd for half a year without someone (speaker or crowd) calling Obama a Communist, Redistributor, Socialist, Traitor, Muslim, Terrorist-Pallin-Arounder or Arab.
This election was over when Obama's similar situation (McCain's name being booed) was "We don't need to do that. All we need to do is vote".
McCain/Palin pretty much said "Well, we do need you to do that."
November 5, 2008 7:52 AM | Reply | Permalink
It only sounds like gracious because it's the first time McCain's been on TV in front of a crowd for half a year without someone (speaker or crowd) calling Obama a Communist, Redistributor, Socialist, Traitor, Muslim, Terrorist-Pallin-Arounder or Arab.
This election was over when Obama's similar situation (McCain's name being booed) was "We don't need to do that. All we need to do is vote".
McCain/Palin pretty much said "Well, we do need you to do that."
November 5, 2008 7:54 AM | Reply | Permalink
For McCain it's a tough thing to accept your philosophical shortcomings. That would be true for anyone. It means acknowledging your opponents values as superior. To ask someone to abandon what they believe overnight is just too big a stretch. That goes double for the competitive types who walk the halls of our nations capitol.
Even if McCain said it I don't think it would be realistic. Better he didn't and be honest, than lie.
November 5, 2008 7:55 AM | Reply | Permalink
Nothing McCain or Palin said during the race was worse than the democratic candidates themselves during the primary, especially near the end. Do you need reminders? How about one reminder - Bittergate.
Perhaps a little forgiveness and some of that liberal empathy is in order?
The speech Senator McCain delivered last night made me damn glad that he hired Bush's gang of losers to run his campaign. The John McCain I saw last night would have been a much bigger challenge for Barack to overcome. As gracious and magnanimous as John McCain was in defeat, liberals need to be in victory.
President Obama's very ambitious platform demands it if your goal is to actually get some things done. Don't paint a narrow, though decisive, popular vote victory as a mandate. We just lived through four years of that nonsense.
It got us exactly no where.
November 5, 2008 7:57 AM | Reply | Permalink
Ditto. McCain sounded like a credible leader last night and was the most coherent I have heard him during the entire cycle. For some on the left, no win is ever good enough, no leader pure enough, no disagreement ever honorable. Let's not be like them!
November 6, 2008 12:20 AM | Reply | Permalink
It was reported last night, at the McCain gathering in Phoenix. When Obama was giving his gratitude speech, McCain’s people shut the Monitors off as soon as Obama spoke.
McCain supporters booed every time he mentioned his opponent.
The rightwing fanatics are rude, obnoxious, and spiteful.
The moderate Republicans better find a home in the big tent of the Democratic Party.
November 5, 2008 8:33 AM | Reply | Permalink
Not going to happen.
Democrats should be as gracious in victory as their new president has been, understanding of the hurt feeling in defeat and then work to bring the nation together. Advocating that everyone becomes a democrat is the worst possible way to achieve Barack's stated goals. It is unrealistic and bound to backfire as a method of negotiation.
Don't treat a five point victory in the popular vote as a mandate that the country is now some extreme leftist Utopia.
November 5, 2008 8:58 AM | Reply | Permalink
Stop hatin' on Mccain.
We're supposed to be bigger than that.
Before last night he, at various junctures, called out his cracker audiences, saying that, no, Obama was a decent man.
November 5, 2008 10:13 AM | Reply | Permalink
And then McCain likened Rashid Khalidi to a "neo-Nazi," to which the only decent reply is this.
November 5, 2008 2:47 PM | Reply | Permalink
I think that under the circumstances, with McCain having to stop multiple times to keep the booing down when he mentioned Obama, this was not the time and place for that extra mile Gitlin seeks.
Odd place for drawing a 'progressive line in the sand' I think. The one thing I'd like to see from McCain is for him to eschew joining in the solid wall of filibusters of his fellow party members or be a "maverick" in the ways that really actually make a difference.
At one point I read somewhere on Democratic Underground, a key bill DURING THE CAMPAIGN to address climate chaos ("global warming") had 59 votes in the senate to stop a filibuster and 40 filibustering. McCain was absent. I hope this is precisely the kind of thing he DOES NOT do to the Obama Administration.
Reaching across the aisle when NOT an investment in one's political career is something to be valued, and thrown up in the faces of those who try to sell themselves as the sort who do that and then don't.
All in all, the speech was McCain at his best, though still not up to Obama's "new dawn of leadership in America" speech, which wasn't that much of a standout for Obama (though, ahem, the CIRCUMSTANCES sure were!)
November 5, 2008 10:14 PM | Reply | Permalink
It was a fine concession speech. Let it go, Gitlin.
November 6, 2008 12:16 AM | Reply | Permalink
I have to agree with Gitlin here--but of course McCain *had* to say those nice-sounding things, totally contradicting his campaign that libeled Obama ad nauseam. Maybe compared to the virulent and childish hatred at the rallies, this could seem "gracious," but it was very dissonant coming after his ad hominem attacks in the past few months.
But I kept thinking during his speech too, in the parts where he talked about the fact that an African American had won: he's making it sound like from now on, racism is over with. He even said something like the "myth" of racial discrimination, didn't he? Like he's always doubted the "liberal" or progressive critique that the American dream wasn't equally attainable for all Americans, and now he knows he was right all along! Racial discrimination was a myth! SEE!
It really foreshadowed the WSJ piece today, basically saying the same sort of thing. So the conservative line on this is gonna be that racism no longer exists and is not a valid issue any more. Yikes. How to rebut that and not diminish the power of Obama's victory?
November 6, 2008 2:00 AM | Reply | Permalink
I have to agree with Gitlin here--but of course McCain *had* to say those nice-sounding things, totally contradicting his campaign that libeled Obama ad nauseam. Maybe compared to the virulent and childish hatred at the rallies, this could seem "gracious," but it was very dissonant coming after his ad hominem attacks in the past few months.
But I kept thinking during his speech too, in the parts where he talked about the fact that an African American had won: he's making it sound like from now on, racism is over with. He even said something like the "myth" of racial discrimination, didn't he? Like he's always doubted the "liberal" or progressive critique that the American dream wasn't equally attainable for all Americans, and now he knows he was right all along! Racial discrimination was a myth! SEE!
It really foreshadowed the WSJ piece today, basically saying the same sort of thing. So the conservative line on this is gonna be that racism no longer exists and is not a valid issue any more. Yikes. How to rebut that and not diminish the power of Obama's victory?
November 6, 2008 2:03 AM | Reply | Permalink