Dear Friend and Reader:
I’VE BEEN SPENDING this last week after election night trying to catch up on some rest. As many of you who have been blogging with me this past week know, I feel as though I’ve been processing this year’s campaign through my immune system. I was working out the stress of accumulated worry over whether or not we would have the same old, or would we be bidding farewell to that phase in our history and moving on to a new chapter.
In an op-ed called “Goodbye to All That” Atlantic Monthly’s conservative columnist Andrew Sullivan wrote in what would be a ringing endorsement of Barack Obama, that his candidacy (and now his presidency) signalled the possibility of the long-awaited end of partisan politics and the culture wars born from the 1960s and the Vietnam War era. He said:
At its best, the Obama candidacy is about ending a war—not so much the war in Iraq, which now has a moВmentum that will propel the occupation into the next decade—but the war within America that has prevailed since Vietnam and that shows dangerous signs of intensifying, a nonviolent civil war that has crippled America at the very time the world needs it most. It is a war about war—and about culture and about religion and about race. And in that war, Obama—and Obama alone—offers the possibility of a truce.
As a member of the latter half of the Boomer generation, I was in eighth grade when Richard Nixon beat Vice-President Hubert Humphrey for the Presidency, elected on the premise of ending the Vietnam war started by the Democrats. His election ushered in the new era of post-Kennedy Republican conservatism — strong on foreign policy and moderately generous in social programs popular in the sixties. At the time, George H.W. Bush was Congressman for the state of Texas, and Ronald Reagan completed his first year as governor of California.
The Vietnam era ushered in the Nixon-Reagan-Bush brand of conservatism, bringing us almost half a century of Republican rule in the White House, which finally ended, at least for the Bushes, last Tuesday night. It completed itself not only with the landslide electoral vote victory for Barack Obama as President, but also with the losses of John E. Sununu, Republican Senator of New Hampshire, son of former George H. W. Bush’s White House Chief of Staff John H. Sununu, and North Carolina Senator Elizabeth Dole, wife of former Senator Robert Dole.