Wednesday 7 November 2012

O happy day!

There's nothing like the prospect of the name 'Mitt Romney' rapidly fading from public discourse to turn a girl's frown upside down! :oD I know that just because the Democrats have emerged victorious doesn't mean that I've heard the last of the Republicans, but it's very consoling to know that Obama and his administration will be the dominant voices coming out of the States. I am imagining an US Politics Word Cloud where the size of the Romney tag is ever-decreasing... soon it won't even be visible to the naked eye.

My dad and I watched Obama's victory speech live on CNN, and were both moved to tears, even though neither of us buy into American exceptionalism. The kind of soaring rhetoric which would be dismissed as overly idealistic in Australia touched on some resonant notes for us, and I was left to wonder what might have been if Obama's race wasn't demonised by a large section of the American population... what kind of policy and personality development he would have been allowed to develop if he were viewed as white. But it doesn't do much good to get lost in a hypothetical universe. No amount of wishful thinking can change the current realities I perceive. Envisioning an Obama leadership free of constant stigmatisation from racist hysterics does however allow me to imagine that Obama could have been a more effective, charismatic and powerful progressive force, and puts things into perspective. We all do the best we can with the circumstances we find ourselves in. Obama has managed to stay in the white house, keeping the politics, if not left-of-centre, then not as right-wing as they would invariably become under Republican governance.

So let's hear it for four more years of America's first third culture kid president! *clink*

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