The First Rising Vibes of an Obama Presidency

Well, Obama is president elect now. I voted for him, and maybe you did too. He’s locked on the tracks to the White House now. He needs to gather up a team of advisors confidants and prove that he’s got the goods that he’s been selling. He sold a lot better than McCain, who let the same pack of amoral bankrupts who destroyed Bush get a hold of him as well. Watching Obama win turned into feeling Obama winning for me.

I was at Blockbuster, working my part time student job, watching the elections from a jerry-rigged paperclip antenna, when CBS made the announcement. The fuzz and the noise and the flickering evaporated and the picture stood clear for a moment. At first, I didn’t feel much at all. It seemed almost inevitable that he would win.

Then McCain gave his concession speech, through the noise and crackle and flicker of our impromptu invasion of the airways, and things started to come in to focus for me. As Obama began his note perfect acceptance speech minutes later I felt a swelling of something in my guts.

It wasn’t the primal roar of the victor or the pride of being involved in some kind of important political campaign. For the first time in my life I felt that I had prevailed. I felt that the energy of the country was moving and seeking in the right direction. This is what it must have felt like to have been caught up in the great wave of the sixties. Thousands of naïve kids, stoned out of their minds, clapping and screaming and grinning at some political rally feeling that their energy had prevailed against the negativity.

Something is at stake here, for me, that is bigger than an election or an issue. For the first time in my politically aware history I didn’t feel like a knife fighter backed into the corner by a gang of club men as I cast my ballot for the highest office in the country. Obama sold me hope, and I was ready to buy. I took it home, and kept in the freezer until the right time rolled around. Now I am thawing it out.

You sold me Obama, you sold a whole hell of a lot of us. Maybe our political system doesn’t have to be a never ending stream of razorblades and bile. I know that you have to moderate. I will forgive the centrism and the compromise, but there must be action.

All of this energy is moving your way, and you need to harness it. You sold a story as much as a platform, and the story’s what I bought. Platforms morph and change to fit the target audience; they lean and sway according to the winds. It’s your steady hand, intelligence and myth that I voted for, and these next four years better be mythical.

We have a couple months before the whole changing of the guard happens, and I will likely have to tolerate more lowest common denominator political “speeches” from the lame duck, and maybe one more boneheaded policy change. That’s fine. I am standing on the brink of total political disillusionment, not with issues, but with politicians. I want this next presidency to be the honest beginning of a new era in American politics. Perhaps that will cost us economically or militarily, but I want a new paradigm, and I feel it on the horizon.

This the knife edge of vicarious experience. Something wild, and out of control is coming. I have been sold, I have committed. The first, tenuous vibes are creeping up my neck, and I am looking forward to a good and colorful trip.