Right, You Did Some Orange Sunshine, Peter

I wanted to spend a couple of days really thinking about the events of last Tuesday night, their ramifications and what they really meant before spouting off some half-thought-out collection of unformed ideas reflecting my immediate mood. I figured nobody wanted to read a bunch of posts that were just a long-winded way of saying "Woo!"

That said, just to get it out of the way: Woo!

The transition between the potential energy of candidacy and the kinetic energy of election is dissipated into friction and heat fairly quickly, in most cases. The historic nature of what's occurred, of course, should make this something of a special case, but the (more?) special and immediate challenges of the moment in every arena--economic, international, military--almost negate the basking time we all, as a people, should enjoy between now and Jan. 20.

Maybe it's the contrarian in me, but instead of being filled with nonstop Hope and Change and all those other things many of us voted for Tuesday last, I keep thinking about this old SNL sketch. (Sorry, there's a commercial before it... no YouTube of it appparently).

Jimmy Carter's become a person who's more than earned his status as American Elder Statesman in a way we haven't really seen in any late 20th century former presidents. Nixon was rightly disgraced, Ford never had the weight of winning an election, Reagan had health issues, the first Bush was shunted off to obscurity by ignominious defeat and Clinton, well, he's never really left the arena. Jimmy Carter's been the one out there doing and moving and daring to speak, which has put a shine on what had been considered a fairly disastrous presidency. But the reason the video clip is relevant is because, as an historian, it constitutes a primary document. What people were thinking at the time, the central joke of the piece, is that Carter was Everything to Everyone. He had all the answers because he was not only wicked smart, but he was decent and good and patient and kind and oh, what an antidote for America reeling from a period of executive abuse of our Constitution and the damage to our international prestige by waging an interminible unilateral war.

I'm just trying to say that before we get ahead of ourselves, let's just remember that 1976 to 1980 wasn't much good to anyone not named Walter Mondale. And even he'd get his in '84.

So that's the Word of Caution.

The other side of last Tuesday is that the only thing I can really think of that might equate to what happened when we elected a black man president might be Neil Armstrong landing on the moon. Except, even though we shared in the awe of the moment because the decals on the side of the spaceships said "USA," in a participatory sense, that feat was achieved by a statistically insignificant number of engineers and near-suicidally brave military test pilots. We all just got to watch.

Well, YOU got to watch. I was still five years short of being born. You are old.

Electing an African-American president was like going to the moon, except somehow 66 million of us were able to fit into the capsule for the trip. And then when we got there, we found out the President of the Moon was a black guy. That's how surprising it was.

I guess what I'm saying is that I anticipate that the Obama Administration, be it one term or two, has reached the highest of its highs. He may be a good-to-great president. I certainly hope he will be. But he can't be EVERYTHING we imagine him to be simply because we've been starved for competence by eight years of willful division, stubborn ideology and imperial pretense. He can't be the answer to every prayer deferred by everyone in the 70%+ who think George Bush is doing a bad job.

Can he?