Rick and Barack? Yuck!

This week, we have witnessed the first scandal of the Obama Administration-to-be. Or so say the media.

Barack has invited evangelical pastor Reverend Rick Warren to give the invocation at his inauguration. Rick Warren is one of the religious leaders who give a powerful voice to the activists of the religious far-right which has supported the Republican party for years, and the Bush Administration in particular.
This move by Obama can be seen as a brilliant one. Keep your friends close and you enemies closer. By inviting someone representing the very people who hate him the most, those who call him a Socialist Muslim terrorist who eats babies alive for breakfast, Obama is sending a signal that he won't be the President of the people who voted for him only. He reaches across the ideological divide. He explains his move by repeating his mantra: "We can disagree without being disagreeable."

Warren, among other negative and positive -- he notably encourages Christians to confront problems like AIDS and climate change -- characteristics, is anti-abortion and anti-gay, which makes his participation at the inauguration of Obama very controversial. The gay community, in particular, is very upset.

The anger of the gay community is very understandable. Warren -- whose church refuses non-repentant gay people and sponsors programs to cure gay people -- equates gay marriage to incest, pedophilia and polygamy. This kind of statement is clearly unacceptable and shocking.
After the shameful passage of Proposition 8 in California, a proposition banning same-sex marriage a few months after it had been made legal by the California Supreme Court, many gay people already feel that their fellow citizens are doing everything they can to deprive them of the right of the pursuit of happiness guaranteed by the Declaration of Independence.
After the announcement of Warren's presence at the inauguration of the President they overwhelmingly supported, they understandably feel betrayed.

However, there is one aspect of the whole thing which I think should be very controversial but that the media have not mentioned at all. Not even the very liberal media like MSNBC.

What in the world is a religious leader doing at the inauguration of the President of the United States?

Even a representative of an activist group called Association for the Separation of Church and State has protested against the participation of Warren on the grounds of his homophobia but has never mentioned that this should not even be an issue, since no religious leader should be praying the Lord at the inauguration of the President.

I have mentioned to a friend of mine who happens to be a quite liberal Southern Baptist pastor that it seems strange to me that the separation of church and state does not guarantee that religious leaders will not participate in the inauguration ceremony. He replied, That's the American tradition. Just like "In God We Trust" stamped on the banknotes. It's ridiculous.

It is a tradition indeed. It is so ingrained that it is not even questioned when an anti-gay pastor is invited to give the invocation at the inauguration of the new President. It is so deeply rooted in American society that people will tell you that this is what the Founding Fathers wanted. They simply ignore that most of the Founding Fathers were a bunch of atheists disguised as deists.

When tradition keeps people into such apathy, it is time indeed for change.

Obama's move is a bold one indeed, and I am pretty sure that he will regain the favors of the gay community by other bold moves. After the Warren participation was announced, Barack declared at a press conference that he was "a fierce advocate of equality of rights for the gay community." I do not think that any president, or any major candidate had declared such a thing before.

However, I wish Barack had made an even bolder move, by not including any religious act in his inauguration ceremony.

I hope Obama is going to win this election

I am very nervous today. For the last month and a half, I thought we were safe, I thought Barack had won the election, but I -- as well as approximately everyone else -- had just forgotten one little detail.

The vote that took place on November 4 did not count for anything.

The real vote takes place today, on December the 15th, or, as the Constitution so clearly puts it, on the first Monday after the second Wednesday of the third December month after the September month of the year two years before Election Year (I hope I am getting that right).

Today, the Electors meet in the capitols of their respective states and cast their ballot. Presumably, they will cast it for the candidate that the people of their state voted for, but they do not have to. They can cast it for whoever they want, or not cast it at all.

This is the Electoral College, a very complicated electoral system that leaves even most American voters confused. Every year I teach the American Presidency, I have to learn it again before my class on the American electoral system. Every year, one student asks one question I don't have the answer to.

As a simplistic reminder, here is what it boils down to.

The American voters do not elect their president directly. They elect a list -- it is really called a slate -- of Electors. This year, they chose either the list for Obama, or the list for McCain. In Oklahoma for example, they chose the list for McCain. On the list in Oklahoma, there are seven Electors, which equals the number of congresspeople Oklahoma has in Washington (5 representatives and 2 senators). Today, these seven Electors meet in the capitol in Oklahoma City and presumably cast their ballot for McCain. They will be 7 of the 173 Electoral votes won by McCain.

At the end of the day, 538 ballots will be cast through the nation. They will be counted by the Congress in joint session on January 6.

Why such a system in "the best democracy in the whole universe"?

Well, because the Founding Fathers did not trust the people back in 1787. The US government was doing so poorly under the first constitution, the Articles of Confederation, that many people started to feel nostalgic of the British tyranny. So to make sure elections would go as planned, the Founding Fathers made sure that people who knew better would cast the final votes, the votes that counted.

Of course, that is not the official explanation. The official explanation is that with this system, small states, with a small population, can have a weight in the elections.
Of course, when we see what actually happens during a campaign, this explanation is not very convincing. Small states never see any candidate, especially if the polls show that they are very likely to go one side or the other.
Again, let's take Oklahoma as an example. This is a very red state -- the reddest this year -- with only 7 Electoral votes. Because it was very likely Oklahoma would go for McCain, Obama never came to Oklahoma during the campaign. Not only that, but because Oklahoma was a sure state for him, McCain never came either.
In a word, the voters in Oklahoma were taken for granted.

And that is the case of many states.

There is something wrong in "the best democracy in the world."

Now, why such delay between the popular vote (on November 4 this year), the Electoral vote (today on December 15) and the inauguration of the President on January the 20th?

Well, because at the time the Constitution was drafted, it took that long to count the ballots and to travel the distances.
Mind you, it can still take time to count the ballots. The results of a Senate race in Minnesota are not yet definitive (that's a whole other story that I will tell in a post I am preparing and which will be entitled "Voting in the Third World").

Today, if we know already who will be the next President, it is because of the advent of communications technology. We know (most of) the results on the day of the popular vote simply because the overwhelming media is omniscient enough to be behind every voter and to know who will be inaugurated almost three months later.

But let us ponder over this for a minute. We know only thanks to the media. Nothing will be official before January 20. But during the whole campaign, John and Sarah told us the media were biased, that Barack was their pet, that they were basically campaigning for him!

What if... what if the media, all this time, were telling us Obama won so that we can get used to the idea of having a Muslim Socialistic terrorist at the head of the "best country on the surface of the earth"?
Once the people is brainwashed into believing that that's okay, then it will be too late to react.

Oh, my gosh, what if they are reading this right now, as I write. They are everywhere, these bloody commies. What if aaaarrrrrrrggggggghhhhhh.............

Different play, same characters

Two weeks since the election. Some results keep falling. Yesterday, we learned that Ted Stevens, Senator from Alaska, a convicted felon, was NOT reelected. A convicted felon lost by so thin a margin that the results were official only two weeks after the election.
But hey, that's Alaska.

Two weeks.
What has happened?

Well, Barack is still here, of course. He will be for the next four years, eight years hopefully. Well actually, he might be here for the next forty years. Yes, apparently, according to some of the best experts -- they are speaking in the telly, so I suppose they are some of the best -- President-elect Obama is a Muslim Socialist taking the country on the slippery slope of dictatorship. So I wouldn't be surprised if one of the first measures Barack takes is shut down Congress, execute the Supreme Court Justices and take all powers in his own hands.
I am not sure that would be such a bad thing, especially if he locks up some of the best experts speaking in the telly.

So Barack is still here, and maybe for a while, but that's not surprising; after all, he was just elected.

Now, more surprising, Sarah is still here.
Oh my gosh, they keep talking about her. She actually keeps talking about herself. We have never seen so many interviews of her. When she was running for Vice President, she was also running away from the evil elite media. Now that she has lost, she talking to everybody.
Well, she might be running for President in 2012. If God shows her an open door.
Yes, guys, don't laugh, she has the experience now. Especially the experience of defeat. There is a rumor that the Obama campaign might raise funds for Palin's campaign in 2012.
Anyway, she does not have any other choice now if she wants to clean up Washington. She hoped to be a Senator. If the convicted felon, Ted Stevens, had won, the Senate would have thrown him out -- after all, he is a convicted felon -- and Sarah could have run for his seat.
But Stevens lost just barely -- well, he is a convicted felon -- so, Sarah won't be a Senator any time soon.

John is still here too. Guess what. Barack invited him for tea. He wants John to work with him. We expect John to be offered a position in the cabinet. Interesting, isn't it. When Barack was talking about bipartisanship on the campaign trail, he was apparently not lying like candidates usually do. This is a bit overwhelming.
What worries me, though, is that John might not be confirmed. If he pals around with Barack, he is actually palling around with a Muslim Socialist terrorist, and so John would be guilty by association, as his running mate Sarah so brilliantly explained the voters during the campaign.
Huh, that's tricky.
Anyway, I hope he will be confirmed, so that I don't have to change the title of my blog.

Finally, guess who's back.
Hillary. Hillary is back. Forget the hard feelings of the campaign during the primaries. Barack wants her to be Secretary of State, that is the person who deals with foreign policy, that is the one subject Barack and Hillary disagreed upon.
Confusing.

Anyway, that's what's going on right now.

Oh, something else. Last night, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy was on David Letterman's show.
I felt a bit ashamed. For months, I made fun of my American friends because their country produced Sarah Palin.
And they got right back at me with Carla Bruni-Sarkozy on TV.

Why John lost

It is time for finger-pointing in the Republican party.

A lot of Republican commentators and editorialists put the blame on the economic crisis. At the beginning of September, McCain was ahead in the polls. Then, there was the economic crisis. Then Obama won.

I think that is a bit too easy.

If McCain lost, it is not because of the economic crisis, but because of the way he handled it. He claimed repeatedly that the economy was fundamentally strong. He "suspended" his campaign to go to Washington give a hand, and then took 23 hours to go from New York to Washington. As David Letterman said then, at the time of the Founding Fathers, it did not take as long to take the trip.
As was said at the time, McCain was erratic and impulsive.
One major reason for his defeat.

One other main reason is, of course, his choice -- although I still believe it was not really his -- of Sarah Palin as a running mate.
Palin will be remembered as the most incompetent and the most ignorant candidate in the history of Vice-Presidential candidates, and a lot of voters, including some Republicans, saw that.

We already knew that she does not know the role of the Vice-President, and that she was incapable of citing one Supreme Court case other than Roe v. Wade.

We are learning more these days. From the McCain campaign, too.

Yesterday, some anonymous sources revealed that she did not know that Africa was a continent, that she thought South Africa was the southern part of a country. She did not know either that Canada, the US and Mexico were part of NAFTA.
We were also told she was a "shopaholic" during the campaign. One aide called her and her husband "Wasilla hillbillies looting Neiman Marcus from coast to coast."

The Republicans are unleashing their frustration. It is a bit unfair, but it is so much fun.
I think we are going to learn much more about Palin in the next few weeks.

And I thought I would miss her.

But the main reason for John's defeat, let us not forget, is that Barack led the best, the most disciplined, the most honest, the cleanest campaign.

This is clearly Obama's victory more than it is McCain's defeat.

Post November 4 ethnic relations

It is quite incredible what is happening here after the election of Barack Hussein Obama (I like using his middle name because I feel that helps our racist friends out there to get used to it for the next four, sorry, eight years).

On election night, we saw Oprah and Jesse Jackson -- along with thousands of other people at the Obama rally in Chicago -- cry like babies. That was amusing and quite to be expected.

But yesterday, we saw Colin Powell, a Republican -- one of the best of them, for sure -- tear up in an interview as he was expressing his happiness for the Obama victory.

Wait, there is better.
Condoleeza Rice, current Secretary of State in the Bush administration, in an interview where she evoked the "extraordinary election" that has just taken place, could not hide shiny eyes from the camera.

Even Bush, whom -- whatever we think of his catastrophic presidency -- we cannot accuse of closing the door of his administration to people from diverse ethnic groups, sounded unusually sincere when he talked of the "stirring moment" that it will be when Barack, Michelle and their two girls walk into the White House.

Maybe I have stayed too much in the US and I am growing cheesy and sentimentalist, but that is something!

The New York Times titled "Obama Elected President as Racial Barrier Falls."

Yet, I don't think this is the end of racism in the US.

Racial prejudice has undermined the whole campaign, in more or less covert ways. After seeing Obama on TV for two years, the question asked by Republicans, Who is Obama really?, was nothing short of racism.

Casting doubts on his religious affiliation as if being a Muslim was a bad thing was nothing but racism.
A student told the campus newspaper that she did not think Obama was a Christian. She said that if he cals himself a Christian, she might have to start calling herself something else.
I want to tell her that Yes, she should call herself something else.
Racist sounds appropriate.

Accusing prominent black political figures, like Colin Powell, of endorsing Obama just because of his black skin, was racism.

Thinking Obama was dangerous for the country was racism.

White men predicting that the Latino voters would never vote for a black man was clearly white racism.
The Latino community overwhelmingly voted for Obama.

Calling the US led by Obama an Obamination, as many people still do today, is racism.

I certainly do not want to be a killjoy. But I don't think such racist prejudices will disappear that easily.
Obama's victory is the best thing that could happen, but as I wrote yesterday, I think he owes his victory mainly to his phenomenal qualities as a political leader.

And I am pretty sure that, if not for racism, Barack Hussein Obama would have won in a landslide rather than just a sweeping victory.

Let's enjoy, but let's remain vigilant.

364

To be elected President, Barack Hussein Obama had to win 270 Electors.

Today, without counting Missouri and North Carolina, which according to the CNN website at 2.20pm Central Time, are still too close to call, Obama has won 349 Electors.
Missouri will probably go to McCain, who will then have 174 Electors.
North Carolina looks like it is going to go to Obama: he will have 364 Electors.

It is a huge victory. In 2004, Bush won with 271 Electors.

As far as the popular vote is concerned, the victory is also unquestionable. So far, Obama is winning with a margin of almost 7 million votes. Obama won 52% of the popular vote. McCain, 46%.

Enough with numbers. What is really significant is that Obama won nine states -- that is to say states who were traditionally red -- including some who had been red states for decades.

He won Colorado, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, Nevada, New Mexico, Ohio, Virginia and probably North Carolina.
The most significant victories are of course Virginia and North Carolina, two states from what is called the Deep South.
All these states were won by Bush in 2000 and 2004, except New Mexico and Iowa, which were red in 2004 but blue in 2000.

This is important because it makes of Obama a President who is more than a sectional President. He is not a bi-coastal President. He represents all parts of the country.
What makes him a unifying President, also, is of course the popular vote, unfortunately not taken much into account in the broken Electoral College system ruling American presidential elections.
In many forever-red states, the margins between the Republican vote and the Democratic vote are smaller than they used to be. For example, in states like Nebraska or South Dakota, the distributions of votes in 2000 were close to 70-30. This year, they are getting closer to 60-40.
In Texas, the proportion is this year 55-45 for McCain. In 2000 and 2004, it was 60-40.

It is in Oklahoma, where I am now, that the margin is the widest: 65.6 for McCain, 34.4 for Obama.

I guess my blog has not been read by many Republicans.
Darn it!

President-elect Barack Hussein Obama

In 1865, slavery was abolished in the United States.
In 1954, the US Supreme Court declared that segregated schools were unconstitutional,
In 2008, a black man named Barack Hussein Obama was elected President of the United States.

Although the media had tried until yesterday not to focus too much on the amazing historical event that an Obama victory would represent, last night, after they called the election, CNN and MSNBC commentators were all about how racial relationships are going to change after this election. Jesse Jackson was crying. Oprah Winfrey was crying. Roland Martin, an African-American CNN journalist, was crying live on TV.

It is really an incredibly important event.

However, we should truly be amazed at the fact that it took so long, rather than at the fact that it finally happened.

Besides, what I find even more amazing -- and beautiful -- is that Barack won this election, he became the first black man to become President, without playing the historical card.
I followed this election closely and I do not recall one moment when Obama appealed specifically to black voters, not one moment he tried to convince the voters to vote for him because it would be a historical watershed moment.
On the contrary, to the end, even when the Republicans were calling one part of the country -- "real America" -- against the other part, Obama always and consistently called for unity.
I never heard him utter such phrases as "as a Black man," or "as an African-American," etc., etc.

He has never defined himself in terms of ethnic identity.

And I think the journalists and commentators should not make such a big deal now out of the fact that he is black. In a strange way, I think it is demeaning his victory. It is saying "People voted for Obama because they wanted to make history, they based their decision on the fact that he is black."

The sad truth is that the racism I saw in this campaign is so deep that it is not going to disappear so easily.

The happy truth is that Obama won this election not because he is black and making history but because he is incredibly smart, he has compassion, he knows the problems voters are facing and he addressed these problems, he sounded sincere all along his campaign. He was truly the best candidate of this campaign, and probably the best candidate in a long time.

And he will be a smart, intelligent, open-minded, tolerant President, and that is the best thing that could happen to this country who has cruelly lacked intelligence in the White House for many years.

Barack Hussein Obama did not win because he is black. This is just a plus. He won because he is brighter than most of us, and probably more honest than most politicians I have seen or heard.

On a humorous note, let me quote a comedian last night on the special show hosted by Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert.
"They were so focused on him being a Muslim and a Socialist, they forgot he was black."