Back in 1980, when Reagan announced “It’s morning in America,” the day after he won the presidential election in a landslide, I remember feeling a chill of revulsion about what was going to happen. And sure enough, Reagan delivered the largest ever transfer of wealth from working people to the already wealthy, plus a tripling of the federal deficit, along with fomenting a general meanness of spirit toward liberals and even moderates that swept the land.
But now, 28 years later, it’s really morning in America, in a much more inclusive sense — for all who believe in the possibility of brotherhood. Even if Obama had lost, his campaign would be credited with moving America forward to the fulfillment of MLK’s dream. (Digby leads with it today).
Obama’s victory is a wonderful thing for African Americans, and the pride and joy in his example has already been an empowering force in Black communities. But it’s a big win for Americans of all races because it shows the world our best side for a change. And it provides an instructive example for Democrats, and yes even Republicans, who want to learn how to run an intelligent, efficient campaign. Political scientists, as well as candidates, will be studying the Obama campaign for many decades to come. And if David Axelrod writes a strategy playbook/memoir, he will get filthy rich, and deservedly so.
Future candidates should also study President-elect Obama’s spirit, the way he responds to criticism, not by bristling or returning personal insults, but instead calmly addressing the core issue with directness and eloquence. His emotional maturity and coolness under fire is indeeed reminiscent of MLK. Last night in Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, Dr. and Mrs. King’s daughter, Rev. Bernice King told a rally about how her mother, Coretta Scott King reacted when she saw Obama address the 2004 Democratic convention. “Bernice, come here,” she said. “I think we got somebody.”
One of the big challenges facing Dems and president-elect Obama in the short run is the meme that ‘America is a center-right nation” and he should proceed accordingly. David Sirota has a couple of interesting posts at Open Left today addressing this fear-based notion (here and here).

I’ve been offline for a while, because I happened to emerge from an election watch event in Washington precisely at the moment when the networks projected Obama to win the presidency.
Downtown D.C. quickly became a street party, with cars honking horns, people screaming and high-fiving each other, and just about everyone looking happy. I’m sure there were some Republicans in the vicinity, but if so, they kept a low profile or went along with the excitement as a matter of empathy or protective coloration.
Ir was by far the most exciting election celebration I’ve ever witnessed, and it was one of the few times I was happy to be in Washington.

It’s now just a matter of time til the presidential election is called for Barack Obama. But I have to admit some dissapointment that Obama lost Georgia pretty decisively, and that Jim Martin lost the Senate race in that state. I fear my concerns about a racial backlash in the Peach State may have been accurate. Obama appears to have barely exceeded John Kerry’s anemic share of the white vote in GA, and the increased African-American vote, and the increased Democratic share of that vote, wasn’t enough.

The national exit polls, as published by MSNBC, show a decisive Obama victory.
He’s up 56-42 among women, and 50-48 among men. He’s down 54-44 among white voters, but up 96-3 (!) among black voters, and 67-30 among Latinos.
He’s winning self-identified independents 51-45, and self-identified moderates 61-38.
And he’s winning younger voters as massively as we all hoped: 68-30 among 18-24 year-olds, and 69-29 among 25-29 year-olds. Among white voters under 30, he’s winning 57-41.
These exits will be “refined” as actual votes come in, so deeper analysis should be delayed until then, but it looks like Obama hit his marks.

MSNBC made a very early call of PA for Obama, with virtually no raw votes in, indicating that the exit polls were decisive. The other nets are holding off for now, probably just waiting for a respectable number of actual votes to make the call.
The symbolism of this result is pretty unmistakable, since PA was supposedly McCain’s breakthrough “Kerry state” to offset his likely loss in “Bush states” like IA, CO, NM and probably VA.
MSNBC has also called the NH Senate race for Jeanne Shaheen, perhaps the shakiest of the Democratic Senate candidates expected to take away GOP seats tonight.
UPCATEGORY: Democratic Strategist

In a final note on turnout levels today, here’s a striking note from MSNBC:

Americans were voting in numbers unprecedented since women were given the franchise in 1920. Secretaries of state predicted turnouts approaching 90 percent in Virginia and Colorado and 80 percent or more in big states like Ohio, California, Texas, Missouri and Maryland.

The general buzz has been that turnout would approach 1960 levels. But 1920? That election, fueled not only by the extended franchise, but by reaction to World War I and polarized excitement about Prohibition, was one of the higher turnout elections in U.S. history.
Meanwhile, the idea that turnout in The Commonwealth of Virginia might reach 90% is especially symbolic. For many decades, Virginia legislated some of the most restrictive voter eligibility practices in the country, aimed not just at African-Americans, but at anyone who wasn’t a property-holder. The aristocratic guardians of the Byrd Machine are undoubtedly rolling in their graves.

At 7:00 EST, polls closed in VT, IN, KY, GA, and VA. The networks called VT for Obama and KY for McCain, but nothing else. This is a actually a very good sign for Barack Obama. If a McCain Comeback was truly developing, he’d be romping in IN and GA.

Like most Democrats, I’m in a pretty good mood today, and expecting a very good evening. But I did read something this morning that set my teeth on edge, which I might as well get out of my system before the inevitable reconciliatory post-election period sets in.
In an article laying out a variety of scenarios going forward, the venerable Carl Cannon includes this one:

The nation experiences another relatively close election, its fifth in a row if you factor out the muddying presence of Ross Perot in 1992 and 1996. In the end, Barack Obama wins a clear-cut victory. The Electoral College follows the popular vote, which most likely would mean that Obama wins in the neighborhood of 52-46, with Bob Barr and Ralph Nader picking up 2 percent between them, and with at least 350 Electoral College votes going to the Democratic ticket. In a gracious concession speech, McCain does not allege that media bias defeated him, and extends a hand of friendship to Obama. During the transition, President-elect Obama reciprocates by offering McCain a cabinet position. On Inauguration Day, Sarah Palin announces her 2012 presidential bid.

What bugs me isn’t the electoral forecast, or the Palin ’12 reference, but instead, the idea that Barack Obama should make the gracious gesture of offering John McCain a cabinet post. Perhaps as a Christian and a national unifier Obama should forgive the nasty and borderline-racist tone of the McCain-Palin campaign down the stretch, but none of us should forget it. I certainly won’t.
I know that some Democrats, many pundits, and most Republicans wouldn’t agree with my assessment of McCain’s campaign, particularly the attribution of race-baiting. Maybe I’m just a race-sensitive white southerner of a certain age who always hears echoes of George Wallace in a certain kind of Republican rhetoic. But by the very end of this campaign, the racial undertones were pretty hard to ignore.
Through early September, when McCain was refusing to run ads on Jeremiah Wright, I thought maybe he really was the decent guy I’d always thought him to be on subjects other than war and peace. But then, when the financial crisis broke out, he embraced the obnoxious right-wing conspiracy theory that the whole mess was the result of an unholy combination of Wall Streeters, congressional Democrats, Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac, and ACORN, all under the aegis of the Community Reinvestment Act, who were determine to give shiftless poor and minority people mortgages they couldn’t or wouldn’t pay.
Turns out that was just an appetizer. The entire Joe the Plumber minidrama–sort of a campaign within the campaign–was linked to McCain’s attacks on Obama’s “socialist” and “redistributionist” tax plan, which McCain finally began describing as “welfare” because low-income working families without income tax liability (but with payroll tax liability) would benefit, echoing a favorite tirade of Tom DeLay.
Now some people, even some Democrats, don’t think that was race-baiting, but rather some sort of rational argument about the macroeconomic effects of marginal tax rates on small business people. If that’s all it was, then it certainly didn’t make any political sense, as Matt Yglesias has pointed out:

It’s fascinating to me how McCain, who spent so much of 1999-2005 at loggerheads with elements of the conservative base, keeps forgetting the distinction between things that make the base excited and things that help his campaign. Sarah Palin is the obvious example, but Joe is in some ways a deeper and truer example. The idea behind the Joe the Plumber saga is that Barack Obama would be bad for people like Joe, a small business owner who is (putatively) prosperous enough to be hit by Obama’s tax hikes on people with over $250,000 in annual income. Of course Joe doesn’t actually earn that much. But if he had, Joe would just be the very model of a hard-core Republican. Whites are more Republican than non-whites. Men are more Republican than women. Small business owners are more Republican than any other occupational group. High-income people are more Republican than are middle-class and poor people. And among white people, those with no college degree are more Republican than those with college degrees.

If, on the other hand, you think the Joe the Plumber gambit was not really about economics, but about race, it makes a lot of sense, as appealing to the ancient fear of a certain type of white (and usually male) working-class voter that Democrats want to tax them to give “welfare” to “those people.” At a time when virtually everyone figured McCain’s strategy was to peel off the kind of white working-class voter who famously spurned Obama in the Democratic primaries, with race clearly being a factor, it’s amazing to me that more observers didn’t make the obvious connection, particularly when McCain did the full monty of racial appeals by caterwauling about imaginary “voter fraud” threats.
Now maybe it’s all a coincidence, and John McCain happened to be simultaneously concerned about poor and minority people getting mortgages they didn’t deserve, poor and minority people getting “welfare” through the tax system, and poor and minority people stealing elections–all at the expense of the hard-working white man from the swing state of Ohio, Joe the Plumber. McCain never even mentioned race, after all. But for those of you old enough to remember the heydey of racial politics, that means nothing. George Wallace used to rant about “bureaucrats” forcing businesses to “hire a certain number of Chinese.” Everybody understood he wasn’t talking about Chinese.
So for my money, count me out on support of any immediate post-election love for John McCain, Sarah Palin (who went down this road before McCain, possibly encouraging him to follow), the McCain-Palin campaign staff, and the conservative commentators who encouraged the worst innuendoes of the Joe the Plumber theatrics. There are plenty of decent and honorable Republicans and conservatives in this country; let Obama and Democrats reach out to them first.

If you’re interested in following reports from around the country on screwups, skullduggery, and sheer chaos at voting places, check out One Vote Live, a blog maintained by the Election Protection Coalition. There’s already quite a backlog of Election Day entries.

One of the more interesting questions that will be answered tonight is whether the southeast will come home in terms of electoral votes. Of the four southeastern states with the most EV’s, one is trending blue (VA), two are toss-ups (FL and NC) and one (GA) is tilting red, but only slightly.
Among poll analysts, the pollster.com map projects the south staying red as a region, with the exception of VA. Chris Bowers’ final poll-averaged projection map at Open Left is a little more optimistic, coloring FL baby blue and NC pink, although his VA is baby blue. The TPM Election Central‘s map shows a blue VA, but toss-ups for the other three. Nate Silver’s map has VA safely blue, with NC and FL light blue, but GA red. Chuck Todd’s MSNBC map has a baby blue VA, a pink GA and toss-up gray for NC and FL.
The November polls suggest a blue tide may indeed be rising in Georgia. The final Insider Advantage poll, taken 11/2 and reported in the Southern Political Report, is calling a “dead heat in Georgia.” FiveThirtyEight.com reports that the Pew, Survey USA and Strategic Vision Polls all taken 11/1, a day earlier, have McCain leading in GA by 2, 7 and 4 points, respectively.
And clearly, the four largest southeastern states are very much in play in terms of candidate visits and ad investments by the Obama campaign.