The Day After: Relief

Day After: Nicolaus Mills – A Sigh of Relief

NOT UNTIL 9:30 p.m., when NBC declared that Barack Obama had taken Ohio, did I allow myself to feel that he was going to win the election. But it was not joy that I felt, so much as relief, when at 11:00 p.m. the networks announced that Barack Obama had gotten the electoral majority he needed. The what-if-he-loses scenarios that had been running in my head since summer (and led me to avoid friends’ election parties) made joy seem frivolous–too close to cheering in church.

Even as the October polls showed Obama pulling ahead, I was apprehensive about his chances in a way that I have never been before in a presidential election. In the previous elections in which I voted, I was always been pained at the thought of the candidate whom I did not support winning. Had Richard Nixon, instead of John Kennedy, won in 1960, I think the Eisenhower years would have gone on indefinitely. Had Barry Goldwater, instead of Lyndon Johnson, won in 1964, I think the civil rights movement would have been dealt a setback. Had Bob Dole, instead of Bill Clinton, won in 1996, I think the rightward tilt that was part of Clinton’s second term would have been far worse.

But John McCain’s presidential candidacy pushed my “what-if” fears to a new level. A McCain victory would have been a disaster on too many fronts for the country to bear. It would have meant:

Continuation of the Iraq War with no prospect of American troop withdrawal any time soon.

The end of the chances for meaningful health-care reform.

Increased racial polarization and new “I told you so” power for Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton.

The continuation of tax and capital gains policies that favor the wealthy.

The slow starvation of Social Security and Medicare financing.

More offshore oil drilling with only token efforts at achieving energy independence through conservation.

A sense by the rest of the world that George Bush was not an aberration.

The most unqualified vice president since Dan Quayle.

I am grateful that none of these scenarios will come to pass. But I remain shaken by the idea that if there had been more racism in the electorate (since 1964 Democrats have averaged just 39 percent of the white vote) or more voter fraud than in 2000, we might be facing a McCain-Palin administration.

I do not share the unchecked enthusiasm that so many of my liberal friends have for Obama. I think that he has paved the way for a new era in civil rights that will allow us to deal with the inequities of race and class that affirmative action fails to address. But what worries me is that all too often he talks as if progress can be conflict-less. Missing from his speeches has been the kind of directness that in the 1936 election campaign prompted Franklin Roosevelt to assure voters, “Your Government is still on the same side of the street with the Good Samaritan and not with those who pass by on the other side.”

In an America in which 85 percent of the population believes that we have been on the wrong track, I am, nonetheless, hopeful. Obama’s electoral success (helped by the $640 million he raised) was a small miracle. He is tough, a fast learner, and best of all, the insecurities of his own life–beginning with a father who abandoned his family and a mother who moved so often that Obama was forever the new kid in school–have given him an abiding sense of others’ vulnerabilities. He is a man at ease with his own self-consciousness and the hopes he has unleashed.

Nicolaus Mills is author of Winning the Peace: The Marshall Plan and America’s Coming of Age as a Superpower.