If the election were held today, which thanks to early voting it partially will be, Obama will win by 8% in the popular vote over McCain, and by an astonishing 375-163 electoral margin. That officially qualifies as a landslide.
What is the GOP ticket's strategy to close the gap?
Good luck finding one. News reports indicate a rift between the hard-line conservative forces represented by Palin and the more moderate McCain faction. This is typically what happens to political parties as they confront utter failure at the polls. They split up into factions, point fingers in blame, and slice their already minority electorate into warring camps.
Thus, we appear to be headed not only for a landslide Democratic victory at the polls, but also into a period of disarray among Republicans that may take a decade or more to recover from.
The first step for Republicans will be how to manage their frightening extremist, Sarah Palin, who is the modern party's equivalent of Barry Goldwater, circa 1964; or the Democrats' George McGovern in 1972. Palin is driving millions of centrist voters to the Democrats, but her extremist base is digging in behind her "rogue" style politics.
The aftermath of this election, on the right, is going to be very ugly.
Meanwhile, the next President of the United States, Barack Obama, needs to get to work assembling an all-star team of advisers and Cabinet officials (Republicans, Greens, Libertarians, Democrats, liberals, conservatives, and centrists) to get this country back on track -- politically, economically, and socially.
He needs to turn the clock back to 2000, when the only other brilliant person to hold the office since 1980 (Bill Clinton) built a national surplus, a vibrant economy, a world at peace, while reducing the size of the central government, supporting free trade, and promoting a "third way" that essentially bypasses the tired arguments between more government or less government by motivating entrepreneurs to reinvent our society, creating new jobs, wealth, and social utility based not on imperialistic military dominance but on mutual global interdependence.
Obama is the only candidate for high office with the intellect to replicate the Clintonian vision. He also has something Clinton lacked, moral strength, which will inspire the American people rather than make us feel sad and depressed.
Barack and his lovely family represent the greatest chance for the U.S. to regain its position as a world leader, not at the point of a gun (the Bush doctrine), but at the inspirational table of conversation.
Those who talk, face to face, rarely kill one another. What the world needs now, in the end, is as all-inclusive dinner party where all of us, regardless of race, party, gender, age, wealth, religion, color, background, or any other foolishness, join together, and, in the immortal words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., sing the old Negro spiritual: “Free at last, free at last, thank God almighty, we are free at last."
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