Loose Ends

Votes are still being counted in the election, but we're almost through that process and most of the decisions have been made.

• This morning, Barack Obama is the president-elect of the United States. That much has not changed, nor will it change.
  
  Obama has about 11 weeks to prepare to take the oath of office on January 20. But he can begin to implement the promise of "change" almost immediately by naming his top advisers and his choices for his Cabinet — and conferring with them on the issues that deeply and directly affect Americans right now.
  
  Those who are tempted to sit back and smile with smug satisfaction over the election of a black man as president have missed the whole point.
  
  To his credit, Obama appears to see beyond the symbolic importance of the election. He "gets it" — or, at least, his words in his victory speech imply that he does.
  
  "This victory alone is not the change we seek," he said last night, "it is only the chance for us to make that change."
  
  True democracy guarantees the right to participate — not the right to succeed.


• Now that the votes have been cast — and most have been counted — can it honestly be said that it made a difference which candidate the Democrats nominated for president?
  
  In an election in which the Democrats appear to have won the White House by about 6-7 million votes and expanded their advantage in both the House and the Senate, did it matter whether a black man (Obama) — or a woman (Hillary Clinton) or an Hispanic (Bill Richardson) or a white Protestant (John Edwards) or a Catholic (the vice president-elect, Joe Biden) — occupied the top spot on the ballot?
  
  I'm inclined to say no — that, in 2008, it was much the same as it was in 1992. Perhaps, with the economic meltdown in September that was practically foretold the month before when job losses were one-fifth greater than expected and the creaking economy lurched toward collapse, it became a foregone conclusion that the Democrats would win.
  
  It's still the economy.
  
  And that always tends to favor Democrats.
  
  Was there anything John McCain or Sarah Palin could do to reverse the outcome?


• The Senate races have produced some astonishing results.
  
  As expected, the Democrats have made gains, and they will remain in the majority — whether independent Joe Lieberman and socialist Bernie Sanders caucus with them, as they have for the last two years, or not.
  
  But the oft-stated goal of achieving a "filibuster-proof" majority in the Senate appears to be out of reach now.
  
  None of the four races that I wrote about last night have been resolved yet, but it looks like the Republicans are leading in all of them, and only one — the race in Oregon — appears to have a significant number of votes still to count.
  
  Republican incumbents in Minnesota and Georgia may have survived by razor-thin margins — but Republican Sen. Norm Coleman may be facing a recount in Minnesota, and Sen. Saxby Chambliss may have been forced into a December runoff with his foe in Georgia.
  
  Alaska's Ted Stevens, who was convicted in his corruption trial last week, may have been re-elected, but it's not quite over.
  
  Late polls indicated that Stevens' opponent enjoyed a comfortable (for a Democrat) lead, but it's possible that, while the rest of the country was making history by electing a black president, Alaska voters may have made some history of their own.
  
  Even though Alaska's governor was not elected vice president, it is my understanding that this could be the first time in American history that a senator has been convicted in federal court and then re-elected by the voters of his state. With 99% of the precincts reporting in Alaska, Stevens leads by less than 4,000 votes.
  
  But, reports the Anchorage Daily News, "Still to be counted are roughly 40,000 absentee ballots, with more expected to arrive in the mail, as well as 9,000 uncounted early votes and thousands of questioned ballots. The state Elections Division has up to 15 days after the election to tally all the remaining ballots before finalizing the count."
  
  We may have to wait awhile longer before we know if Stevens has been returned to the Senate.
  
  Perhaps, in the final week of the campaign, Alaska's voters grew tired of being laughed at, had enough of seeing their governor ridiculed and then being told they couldn't re-elect an 84-year-old senator who had been convicted of corruption charges.
  
  So, perhaps, those voters have sent their own message of "Yes, we can."