Well, ReasonWorks has launched.  Because we launched during a historic week in which America elected the first African-American president, and since it is so de rigueur to do an election post-mortem, it seems that my first post here should do no less.

The morning after the election a good friend of mine in Germany – knowing I am not on the Obama bandwagon – wrote to ask what I think about this historic event.  He had attended an election party where over 1000 people had shown up to watch the election returns.  Although American elections tend to play large in other countries, Obama has galvanized the rest of the world in the same way he has galvanized America.  So now that we have president-elect Obama what is to be said about this long and interesting campaign and the choices America made?

Clearly, there is immense significance in the up-spring of hope and excitement that accompanied this election.  Obama’s election is an historical event; first African-American, voter turnout, etc.  However, this election has been fueled from day one by directionless emotional fervor.  Deconstructing that emotional fervor is probably the best place to start an “election post-mortem” for a think-tank dedicated to explaining why reason works.

There is a general feeling in this country (and the world) that Bush sucks.  But, with this general feeling of distaste for Bush is a distressing inability to explain precisely why Bush sucks.  Despite all the reasons that may be feasible to list – and I can list plenty – the issue has simply come down to image.  From day one of the Bush presidency the word was put out that he was an idiot.  Many remember the Saturday Night Live skit about the Bush/Gore debates in which Bush sums up his campaign with the word “strategery.”  I have met many who believe Bush actually used this word.  Fiction has been blurred with reality, mantras have been confused for insight, and Bush’s emerging image of “evil” was combined with notoriety as an idiot to produce a truly distasteful reputation.

These ideas were so continually hammered into our daily life that it was easy to find oneself slowly beginning to believe it.  There were, of course, those who always had and always would believe it; the committed Democrats into whose biases the “idiot” and the “evil” image fit perfectly.  There were also those who would never believe it; the committed Republicans for the same reason.  But, these are just the “wingnuts” who make up the base of both parties’ constituencies.  Both sides can relate endless reasons for their opinion of Bush.  Rather than being directionless emotional fervor it is decidedly directed emotional fervor.  But, as with all elections, the question of why the committed party members voted is both uninteresting and irrelevant.  “Swing votes” – people who can be convinced otherwise – are always the deciders of elections.

Swing voters were the most significant segment of the population that underwent this slow and imperceptible change of attitude toward Bush.  Eventually, the 20% of moderate, right-leaning Bush supporters could do nothing but acquiesce to the belligerent shouting of the crowd around them.  Maintaining one’s mental ground against an onslaught of naysayers – in other words, holding your own while more and more people (people you care about) change their minds – is always a difficult task.  It becomes extremely difficult when the onslaught includes moral judgments and invectives.  In other words, enough people saying “if you continue to support Bush then you are a bad person” gets a little difficult to withstand.  At some point a tipping point is crossed and one can safely assume – say upon encountering a new group of people at an after-work happy-hour – that no Bush supporters are there and that Bush-bashing can freely cross the table without fear of offense.  Those that do support Bush are too out-numbered to voice dissent and they will just laugh along with the group while quietly skulking over their beers.  These small social interactions are like geological change; they eventually take their toll.

This is the subtle force that pushed those 20% of people who liked Bush as late as 2004 into the anti-Bush camp by 2008.  My math is as follows; 50% – about how much of the vote he got in 2004 – minus 20-25% equals his current approval rating; 25-30%.  This is the “headwind” that hit so many Republicans.  Guilt by association became the watchword.  McCain was probably the best the Republicans had to counter a headwind that became a tornado; a nearly perfect storm of opposition.  Not only is it incredibly hard for a party to win a third term (it has happened only a few times in US history) but that difficulty is compounded by an incumbent with a 25% approval rating and a massive economic downturn (which are always blamed on sitting presidents).

But, we need to look at the facts too.  Many will respond that Bush’s support sunk so low because he is an objectively bad president.  Well, objectivity has very little (almost nothing) to do with political opinion; particularly political opinion en masse.  How bad is Bush actually?  I am not a Bush fan; but I am not a Bush hater.  When all is said and done, I see Bush as a third quartile president (from the top [best] down).  In other words, he is between the 22nd-33rd best president ever.  Not good, but not the worst.  Two important pluses can be mentioned for Bush that – when history clears away the anti-Bush paraphernalia that’s been cluttering its desk for eight years – I hope will be backed with more information: 1) that we weren’t attacked again and 2) that a relatively stable economy was maintained despite beginning his presidency with an immense economic downturn and an appalling attack on the country.  Furthermore, history will finish the tale on Iraq.  It is a tale that increasingly looks like it will have a happy ending.

However, how bad Bush actually is is pretty irrelevant.  My point is to recall the old political golden rule; that perception is reality.  There was an emotional downturn that hit Bush after 2004, striking the 20% of middle-of-the-road Bush supporters the hardest.  This is the emotional void that Obama came into and filled with his message of hope and change.  What was so astounding at the beginning of the campaign – and is still astounding – was how empty this message was from day one.  I would sit and watch dumbfounded as people took up this message like a mantra; “hope, change, hope, change.”  I am not being totally facetious when I say that Mussolini and Hitler ran on the same platform.  Let me be clear; Obama is NOT like Mussolini or Hitler.  “Hope and change,” however, is not a political platform; it is – always has been and always will be – a smokescreen for a political platform.  Your first impulse when encountering such rhetoric should be extreme skepticism; no matter which side it is coming from.

As we stand now, Obama is still radically unknown.  We elected a 47 year old president with almost no political experience who has spent his entire political career gunning for the presidency because he was able to get up and tell us – in his undeniable eloquence – that he would make things better.  We traded one vacuous, ill-defined emotion – Bush hatred – for another vacuous, ill-defined emotion; Obama hope.  As there are a huge amount of people who hate Bush and don’t really seem to know why (“he just sucks”); there are now a huge amount of people who love (and I mean really LOVE) Obama and don’t really seem to know why (“he’ll make it better”).  The crowd pushes and it pushes all of us.  The happy-hour crowd was shouting over beer-nuts and Steppenwolf; “if you support Bush you’re a bad person” and “how can you not support someone as inspiring as Obama?  What, do you not want things to be better?!?”  I’m not saying that peer pressure caused weak-minded people to surrender their thoughts to the crowd.  I’m saying that the power of the crowd to effect all of us is often underestimated and when your mind is capable of changing – when you are a swing voter – it can often tip the scales.  While this election does give me hope that America can, in fact, elect a black man whose ancestors – just 50 years ago, in my parents’ lifetimes  – were not allowed to attend the same schools as whites, it also reiterates and makes me re-fear what I have always known; that politics runs on emotion and not reason.

Do I think Obama will ruin this country?  No.  I would have been pretty happy with Obama as president and a Republican congress.  Obama’s ability to inspire confidence is undeniable and, sometimes, this is one of the most important traits a president can have.  A unilateral government, however, is always something to fear.  A unilateral government with a economic crisis is very dangerous; particularly when that government is controlled by an ideology that wants to fore-go economic reality for utopian ideals.  Economic crises are usually created by governments fostering incentives that disconnect people’s choices from reality.  This is a bad idea all the time but the absolute worst time to do it is during a shaky economy.  FDR’s utopian vision for America in the face of needed economic realism, his anti-business and anti-rich attitude, and the unpredictability of his policies all helped contribute to the severity of the depression.  Although FDR managed to inspire hope in people he also helped perpetuate the poverty that made them require hope in the first place.  Obama seems distressingly similar.  In my mind, an Obama to inspire confidence and a congress to check his impulses would be preferable to an aligned government.

But, I don’t know.  Obama is such a profound unknown that no one can accurately predict how he will govern.  He played two sides in the campaign – going far left in the primaries and repudiating those positions in the general election.  While this is a common political maneuver, Obama showed what I would describe as spinelessness; flipping on Iraq, domestic surveillance, off-shore oil drilling, and campaign finance.  Ironically enough, I hope he is spineless or at least willing to make concessions (the positive spin of “spineless”).  Nothing is more dangerous than the true-believer.  As we go into a profound economic downturn Obama has promised $4.3 trillion(!) in entitlements over the next ten years.  He promised this from a government that, without action, will go bankrupt in a decade from the combined weight of existing entitlements (social security, medicare, medicaid).  This is an unbelievable amount of redistribution that has not been rivaled since LBJ and FDR.  With new economic realities settling in we know that tax-receipts will be down, investment will be down, and that capital gains will be essentially non-existent.  For fiscal year 2008 the government will run nearly a trillion dollars in deficit.  There is simply no way that anyone has yet figured out that he can pay for this.  In his nomination speech he promised he had every dollar accounted for (by soaking the rich, of course).  This is far from the truth.  (Here is a good account.)  I hope he doesn’t have the spine to stick to his promises.  I hope he just used those promises to buy people’s votes and doesn’t intend to actually stick to them.  Alas, I fear I am wrong.

One thing I think I can guarantee is that people will be disappointed.  I don’t know how disappointed but there will be some; primarily in that 20% I keep mentioning.  This messiah worship stuff can only sustain itself for so long.  As Jesus has proved, the only way for a Messiah to keep people happy is to never return.  That way there is always a “maybe tomorrow” to keep them going.  Much like the last episode of Seinfeld or Star Wars Episode 1 – there is no way you can’t be disappointed.  No one can solve all your problems.  The first person who should learn this lesson is president-elect Obama.