Barack Obama will be my president and yours. If he governs as he has voted in the Senate, I will criticize his policies, but will understand he puts those policies forward in the national interest.
It looks like Obama will win with a popular-vote margin of about five points, decisive, but not a landslide. He is the first non-incumbent Democrat in seventy-six years to break 51% of the popular vote, being only the fifth member of his party to win a majority of the popular vote since the Civil War. Pretty impessive.
Barack Obama had the right slogan for the times, “change.” John McCain’s slogan, “Country First,” didn’t really capture the popular imagination. Perhaps, he should have run on reform, a word which has career and that of his running mate and would likely have defined his Administration had he won.
That said, given all Obama’s advantages, the financial crisis in the midst of the campaign, the media bias, his fundraising advantage, his ground game, right now it doesn’t look like a realigning election.
Should, however, the president-elect govern effectively, the election of 2008 could be a harbinger of realignment.