By Judith Gayle | Political Waves
I’ve done my best not to pay attention to politics this week, decompressing from the election crescendo. My computer devolved into a hunk of lifeless technology to celebrate the Merc-retro, assisting my news fast until mid-week, when Huffington finally loaded and I discovered that there was no honeymoon period for the returning president or congressional newbies from the rapacious infotainers we think of as ‘the press.’ With only 45 days (at this writing) before we supposedly plunge over the fiscal cliff and back into recession, time is too short for much political respite, unless, all ’emergencied out,’ you take it. I took it.
Oh, bits and pieces seeped in, thanks to the occasional browse by CNN, HSN and FOX. Fears over the ‘grand bargain’ were only somewhat allayed by Obama’s oath not to extend tax cuts for the rich and Biden’s promise not to mess with Social Security. We’ve seen this president fold quickly enough in his prior incarnation, so with a new term in front of him, we’re holding our breath to find out if he lives up to his reputation as “teachable.” It could happen, stranger things have. It seems to me that the public turned out to be more teachable than some of us (about half) assumed. We need only to look at the election result to see the breadth of it.
We are in what wordsmith Mark Morford calls “the twilight of the old white guys.” The right was depending on their surety that young folks were too disenchanted to turn out, that women had thumbed their noses at secular healthcare, that the disenfranchised would not suffer a half-day wait for the voting booth, nor would the Latinos who “should be Republicans but don’t know it.” Ahhhh, but that didn’t go as planned. All those folks showed up and voted their own interests this time around. Looks like what’s wrong with Kansas can just STAY in very-red Kansas, thank you very much (and Missouri, more’s the pity).