Twenty-four Hours

That's how long we have before the first polls start reporting in the Presidential election. In twenty four hours we'll start seeing exit poll results from Vermont, Virginia, Indiana, Kentucky, South Carolina and Georgia, with real poll results soon afterward. If Obama takes Virginia, Indiana and Georgia, it will be lights out for John McCain and an early call to this presidential election. An important thing to remember is that Democrats voted strongly in early polls where they were availalble. This may well act to skew the results of exit polling in favour of Republicans, so take exit poll numbers with some additional grains of salt. If McCain holds both Indiana and Georgia, then we'll have to wait for the 7:30 EST closing states to assess the election. Those are Ohio, West Virginia and North Carolina. If Obama has taken Virginia and proceeds to take either Ohio or North Carolina, once again it's lights out for McCain. McCain's path to victory is extremely narrow, and I don't see any realistic way that he wins this election.

The important question to be asked now is just how much change a President Obama will bring. On too much, he is simply a reiteration of the status quo ante in American politics: unqualified support for Israel, opposition to marriage equality, bellicose attitudes toward Cuba and Venezuela and the orthodoxy of capitalism. Not that I expected anything different from him. Let's face facts. Even a left-wing Democrat would be, at best, a centrist Liberal in Canada. Horatio Alger-ism and class misidentification have produced a phenomenally distorted public perception of class in American society. American society is deeply inculcated with a Pavlovian hostility to socialism, despite the fact that socialism would produce better lives and more true freedom for a great majority of the population. The American political spectrum is so skewed to the right that a depressing number of Americans actually believe that Obama is a socialist. To their credit, many do not, but in a country where "liberal" is a slur (despite the country being deeply liberal in the classical sense), it is hardly surprising that so many react with snarling hostility to the cry of "socialism."

All of that aside, Obama is still a better choice for President. While he will not likely move significantly to the left on either foreign or domestic policy (if he does I will happily eat crow), John McCain would continue the move to the radical right, appointing judges to strike down a woman's right to choose, continuing the abusive excesses of executive power perpetrated by the Bush government, further reducing tax rates on those with the most, cutting services for those with the least, bloating the military further, running up ever more ruinous debt loads, pursuing ever more violent foreign policies and seeking to destroy the United Nations to replace it with some NATO-type proxy.

No, Obama is not what I would want, or even want to settle for, but he is still better than McCain, who is, quite simply, scary. I hope that Americans vote for Senator Obama tomorrow, and I hope that he proves me wrong and becomes the transformational, progressive, President that there is an opening for him to be.

Days Remaining in Bush Presidency: 77