Venting

I don't think it takes one of these pompous panelists who circulate through Meet the Press or Charlie Rose to recognize what cost John McCain the election. Two words: George Bush. President Bush, despite having admirable qualities, made several catastrophic and inexcusable mistakes during his administration that served to stigmatize John McCain. The single biggest miscalculation is, of coarse, the war in Iraq. What a tremendous blow to the gut of the American people when it was concluded that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq; that there were never any definitive ties between Iraqi diplomats and elements from Al qaeda. Can anyone put a mental grip around the price this nation has dished out, in terms of American lives and taxpayer money, in funding a war over falsified data?

Then came the economy meltdown. Hundreds of billions of dollars were procured to bail-out white collar crooks that drove this country to near financial demise. While Democrats contributed to this economic condition, the most visible branch of government to the American people - the Executive branch - will invariably be assigned culpability.

So what were voters looking for? They were looking for anything that wasn't George Bush. They were looking for someone who was not involved in initiating the Iraq war as appose to someone with the necessary leadership that could remove American forces prudently out of there. They were looking for someone who was not in the Oval Office when the economic meltdown occurred, despite the fact that the President is not the one who should be assigned the bulk of the blame for that fiasco. They were looking for a president who was not directly linked to over four-thousand dead Americans in Iraq for reasons that were completely frivolous. Basically, Obama is the embodiment of the absence of Bush, while McCain was tragically stigmatized by the President.

In a sense, Barack Obama remains very distant from this presidential election, since who and what he is remains, to some degree, undefinable and obscured. With George Bush's tremendous unpopularity, this election is a case of voters who were driven away from one candidate as oppose to being drawn to another. Can you imagine how Hilary feels? She might never again see a political climate that could have been so conducive to her victory as this last one.