EDITORIAL: Fate smiles on Obama

By The News Virginian Staff

Published: November 5, 2008

So ends a campaign that feels as though it began before the candidates were born, well, at least one of them. Barack Obama has crossed a racial threshold once considered impassable, winning election to one of history’s most extraordinary offices, that of president of the United States. Before asking the larger question, another is worth considering.

How did he do it?

Rising from Chicago, the Illinois state Senate and finally the U.S. Senate, Obama parried rather than parlayed a sparse resume and a thin shroud of naiveté, and launched a relentless, dizzying climb to the pinnacle of global politics. Hillary Clinton, who assumed four years ago that the Oval Office was hers, is still gazing in the direction of the truck that hit her.

Obama did it, masterfully, first with rhetoric that sung, by steering wide of the smug partisanship that marked his party’s previous two candidacies and zeroing his attention on the people, whose votes he required, rather than opponents, who existed only for contrast. The music his rhetoric produced was decidedly popular, with a throbbing rhythm, change and hope forming the drumbeat, and though the lyrics said little, the feeling they evinced was unmistakable. It felt good.

He did it second, and also with mastery, with cash and campaign organization so brilliant as to be almost ruthless. No campaign in American history was better funded or more shrewdly run. Republicans twice have been awed by the opposition in the last three decades, in the 1990s, by Bill Clinton’s personal political acumen and now, by Obama’s skill and his mighty campaign machine.

Obama now must determine what to do with the presidency he has won.

He has promised Planned Parenthood that the first thing he will do once ensconced in the Oval Office is sign the Freedom of Choice Act, which would overturn most restrictions on abortion. Congress must first get around to the business of passing the law. This also applies to the Employee Free Choice Act, which would end secret ballots in union elections, and the Fairness Doctrine, which would end free speech on radio.

Another thing he has promised, to Time’s Joe Klein: “a new energy economy ... That’s going to be my No. 1 priority.” Well, fine. But, of course, Obama does not mean drilling for oil where America has it, offshore and in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

He means investing billions of dollars in researching alternative energy. We would just as soon have America take energy from wind or solar power as anything else. The trouble is feasibility. The idea of renewables replacing fossil fuels is to liberals what Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative was to conservatives, an exercise in delusion. No evidence yet exists to demonstrate that renewables can provide more than a marginal portion of the world’s energy output.

For more than 18 months, Obama has subsisted on such things, on the immaterial, on that which can only be sensed rather than touched, and this has carried him, as if on air, into the presidency. Now he stands at the helm of a country in the throes of recession in an era when deadly enemies lurk. The music has stopped. Obama has won hearts, but with the hard business of governing at hand, can he keep them?