Godspeed, Barack Obama

Barack Obama sailed to a resounding victory tonight. This election is historic for all the reasons pundits have said. It’s historic in its repudiation of the long and terrible legacy of racism. It’s historic in its repudiation of a painful and counterproductive foreign policy.

But above all, and however you feel about it, it’s historic because it shows the extraordinary strength and resilience of our democracy. I keep coming back to a story General Odom used to tell about Vietnam and Watergate. At the time of President Nixon’s resignation, Odom was serving as an attache in the U.S. embassy in Moscow, and a number of Soviet officials told him privately how astonished they were by the events in America. The Soviet Union could never withstand the departure of a head of state, they said, and the United States was riding it out without a hitch.

It’s easy to say President Obama will face all the problems McCain would have, and that dictators are rejoicing over his election. But in January, they’ll find that the United States is still the United States, as powerful as it was before he took office, and more so for being led by a President with more public support than they’ll ever enjoy.

With this election, conservatives are finally going to begin having the arguments they haven’t been allowed to have in public. They’re going to begin talking seriously about the direction of the country, figuring out where they went wrong, and planning how to get back into the majority. That’ll make them stronger, and it’ll make the country stronger, too.

I have no illusions about what’s to come. I think Obama and a strongly Democratic House and Senate (56 seats and counting, as of now) are likely to enact a domestic policy more disastrous than anything we’ve seen since the 1970s. We’ve already got something on the order of $50 trillion in unfunded liabilities for Social Security and Medicare, and universal healthcare and all manner of pie-in-the-sky energy programs won’t help our financial situation.

But we have to return to a more sober foreign policy, and solve today’s problems before we solve tomorrow’s. So to Obama and his team, all the best, and Godspeed.