Wednesday, November 05, 2008

Jim Oh-fer-five

Democrat Bill Foster defeated Republican dairy magnate Jim Oberweis for the second time in the 14th Congressional District Tuesday night. That's Dennis Hastert's old seat. Foster won a special election to replace Dennis Hastert in March, and this time around Foster's margin of victory was even bigger than it was in the spring. Oberweis, for those of you who don't know, is the hypocritical anti-illegal immigration crusader who has now lost five elections: for U.S. Senate in 2002 and 2004, for governor in 2005 and now twice for Congress this year in Hastert's district.

Again I say it's time to hang it up, Jim.

The Indignant Citizen

President Barack Obama

How fucking cool is it write that? Turns out I needn't have worried. Truthfully I was apprehensive about the American public's capacity to focus on the issues facing this country and ignore the noise. But score one for for my fellow citizens.

I'm exhausted, but over the next couple of days I'll try to put together some thoughts on what it was like to be in Grant Park tonight, with 125,000 other people, cheering for a candidate that maybe not everyone believed in at the beginning, but who we gradually infused with our hope for a better future. I'll tell you this, the call by CNN on the big screen TV that Obama had won came suddenly after a commercial break at 10 p.m. Central Time. The crowd where we were standing, near the Petrillo Bandshell, erupted in shouts and whistles and hugs, along with shouts of "O-ba-ma, O-ba-ma" and "Yes we did!" People were jumping up and down; groups of people bounced with their arms around one another, flashbulbs popped. It was as much a sense of relief as it was joy that swept across the crowd in Grant Park. Relief that Obama had won and relief that the result was known relatively early.

I'm filled with optimism tonight. The historical magnitude of what's occurred will take some time to sink in completely. But the emotion of it all hit everyone in Grant Park upside the head immediately. It's good to feel ... good about the president again.

The Indignant Citizen

Tuesday, November 04, 2008

A Long Day Turns to Night

I know a lot of folks are feeling optimistic about an Obama victory tonight in the presidential election, but I can't shake this sense of foreboding.

Shortly after polling places opened there were reports of long lines, inept election officials, the Black Panthers patrolling one precinct in Philadelphia, wet ballots in Virginia and myriad other problems in swing states that either Barack Obama or John McCain must win to win the White House.

Here in Chicago the day dawned sunny and there was a giddiness in the air. The stage seemed set for an election night party, with warm temperatures, no rain and an entire lakefront park waiting to be filled with folks eager to be as near as possible to history—an Obama win. Or at least, that was the Hope. The reality could still turn out to be quite different.

If these reports of lines and faulty electronic voting machines and wiggy ballot handling persist, and some of these swing states that have looked for weeks as though they were leaning toward Obama start showing McCain tendencies instead, I think we'll see protests in Chicago and plenty of people hollering "disenfranchisement" and "fraud" and maybe even "revolution."

We should know not long after, say, 8 p.m. in Chicago whether voting irregularities in places like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida and Virginia are serious enough to merit legal challenges. If so, this election may well be decided in the courts. If by, say, 10:30 p.m. in Chicago the electoral vote dominos haven't begun falling pretty clearly one way or the other, the night will likely end in an anticlimactic sense of frustration. What to do, then, with 200,000 or 500,000 or a million people with enough political conviction on one side of the ledger to wait for hours outside in November in downtown Chicago for a sense of resolution that never came? That's a scene that could get ugly in a hurry. Imagine July 3rd in Grant Park if 9:30 came and went with no fireworks, and no explanation. By 10:15 it'd be time to high-tail it out of the line of fire, bubba.

There is a chance that this election will be a landslide win for Obama. Personally, I hope so. A win by Obama would be a victory for intellectualism, for diplomacy and for racial advancement. It would be a repudiation of class warfare, demagoguery and this weird celebration of ignorance in which we've been engaged since the mid-1990s. If Obama ends up being half as good as I think he could be he'll still be twice as good as McCain at his best.

But there's a long night ahead before all that. My fear is that it will be a long night followed by many more long nights and days.

The Indignant Citizen