An Officer and a Gentleman

John McCain started adult life as an “officer and a gentleman”; he remains an officer and a gentleman. It was a most gracious concession speech, hopefully it will even be a healing speech. He remarked on the election of a black American to the Presidency, and he promised to do all he could to help the new President. He called upon his followers to do the same.
He said that losing was all his fault. Good officers do that. Eisenhower gave a victory speech when D Day succeeded—but he had another speech in his pocket in case the invasion failed. It said, “It is all my fault.”
To paraphrase Shakespeare, nothing became McCain’s campaign so much as his leaving it.
So it’s President Obama. He just never quit; he kept chugging along. There were times during the primary season when he reminded me of the Tortoise. Hilary, the speedy Hare, kept winning big states, but Obama slogged around picking up delegates in little bitty states. He proved Aesop right.
After the Republican convention his numbers dropped again. By mid-September it was a real horse race. There was no sure winner. And then came the collapse of the banks and the once great houses of finance. People were losing their retirement, their equities; even their savings seemed threatened.
When that happens you blame the party in the White House. That’s probably fair enough since the same President will take full credit while the markets go up and people make money. Poor John McCain –he had the Republican label printed all over him.
I won’t even try to speculate on whether Sarah Palin made a significant difference. But I honestly cannot see how Romney or “America’s Mayor” or anyone else on the ticket would have helped either –not with the entire American financial structure tottering toward bankruptcy.
After that the Democratic horse pulled into an insurmountable lead. It would have taken a “walk on water” or “raise the dead” miracle for any Republican to win the White House yesterday. They can try to blame Greenspan, or even Ayn Rand—they can point out that these policies were followed during Clinton’s administration (and that up to this summer, the Democrats were bragging on that fact), but the reality is that the roof fell in on a Republican watch.
The Republicans haven’t faced a massacre like this since LBJ crushed Goldwater in 1964—or Roosevelt buried Landon in 1936. As football coaches, facing a dismal season, like to say, “It’s rebuilding time.”
This week’s Newsweek has a long article pointing out that Obama faces massive troubles—for which there may be no easy cure or any cure at all. You can immediately point out that Roosevelt faced a similarly daunting task—and didn’t see victory over the Depression for ten years.
But I will point out some significant differences. In Roosevelt’s time we didn’t have trillions in debt piled on us—that has to be serviced at huge cost before we can do any rebuilding. Even if an Adolph Hitler is waiting in the wings for us to wage war upon, where is the huge pot of gold that we picked up when the shooting stopped in 1945?
But that lies in the future. Right now we can say to the entire world, no matter how much hostility may exist between individual blacks and whites, a black American CAN climb the highest mountain.
What Abraham Lincoln wrote to Frederick Douglas is now refuted. Even if I thought the races equal—which I do not—he wrote, the American public would not accept such an idea. Well, Obama just went equal big time: with the likes of Eisenhower, Kennedy, Reagan, both Roosevelts, Jackson, Washington, Jefferson—and Lincoln, himself.
Now he’s got to deal with it. Whether he will be a “good” president or a “bad” one waits to be seen. But nobody can argue that he’s a racially inferior one. He settled that for all time.