No. That's not a typo sitting up there.

A year ago I posted a few

hopes for the new year... skipping the blatantly personal...:

1. A political campaign that is based at least in some part on the best aspects of our country: our optimism, our commitment to freedom and equality, and to the general welfare of our people and others around the world.

2. A political campaign that results in the election of a president who was nominated by the Democratic party and a United States Congress with two houses under sufficient control of the Democratic Party that it might accomplish something to rid ourselves of the stench of the years since people of ill will conspired to seize control of the government of this country.

3. Another world championship for the Boston Red Sox (and a 17th such championship for another team would be nice, too.)

and I got 2 1/2 of the 3, which ain't bad, and, oddly, I think 2008 will be remembered as a a great, perhaps watershed year, even though it is ending on a decidedly down and somewhat frightening way, and for good reason.

This paradox of sorts is discussed below:


Tough as it is to write history on the last day of the year one is writing about, a few things seem likely to be remembered. The year began with a clear sign that 2008 would be a good year for Democrats, if they did not destroy themselves.

My candidate at the time was Senator Edwards, but,as I wrote often at the time (and was occasionally flamed for doing so) any of the Democratic candidates then running, except perhaps for the quite unlikely Gravel or Kucinich, were fine with me. As it turns out Senator Edwards might not have been a real good choice (who knew?) and, on pure merit alone, I actually found my self in agreement with and admiration for Senators Dodd and Biden more than anyone else.

But as posted at Daily Kos almost exactly a year ago:

The very best diary I have read [on the subject] made the point as well as anyone has, that any vote for any Democrat will be a good vote and, more importantly that any of the Democrats currently running will be an excellent candidate to be the next president, with the potential to be a great or at least excellent president.

By mid January, when it became clear that the nominee would be either Senator Clinton or the current President-elect, I chose the latter (based in part, I should note, on something written by some supposed lightweight celebrity named Caroline Kennedy) and got flamed into near silence by other Edwards supporters who wondered where my principles were and what magical force had "ended" the election.

My various attempts to explain my apostasy seem almost painful a year later: Like this one directed to a presumably young person who instructed me that

the primary is not the time to vote for a candidate because everyone else is, but because what he/she speaks to your heart and ideas. John Edwards' nomination would send the right message--we are fed up with the way the Republicans have been running things and it's time for a new direction. Obama to me is about hope; Edwards is about action.

to which I responded with

The primary is the way to have an influence on who your party nominates. The candidate we both favor has not won any primary, and is not favored by the vast majority of those who have voted. To insist that our choice should be the nominee despite all that, and the preferences of our fellow Democrats (who have chosen to nominate either the first serious female candidate or the first serious black candidate) displays an arrogance in the mold of George W Bush.

And I am happy with my choice, and would be only slightly less happy with the choice of the other candidate.

Ah, those were the days. But far more important, in the arc of history is that my biggest fear, what I thought of as The Question as the year began, was answered with a resounding, historical and hopeful, yes, a "yes" that, I earnestly believe, may mark one of the most important turning points in the history of the country, as important as the appointment of General Washington to lead the Continental Army, and the elections of Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who together are the three most important presidents in terms of making us the beacon of freedom we believe ourselves to be in our greatest moments.

The Question was whether

a black man, even one whose mother was not, even one who grew up in, of all places, Hawaii, [could] actually be elected president in 2008.

and, in January, 2008 it was something I hoped was so

to the core of my being. I have lived through the greatest change in the attitudes of this country toward race that has ever taken place, one that has completely changed the political face of this country in so many fundamental ways, most good, some not (the South is now solidly Republican instead of disgruntled, but reasonably dependable Democratic votes), and yet, and yet, even based on things which appear in these progressive pages, let alone in the comments of and the hearts of people throughout Iowa and the rest of the country, there is no denying that we have not reached the day when people are judged "by the content of their character" which remains a dream almost 40 years since it was first described to us.

I said then that one of the people closest to me

a wise woman not easily stampeded into her opinions, very quietly told me ... that she thought the nomination of Sen Obama was the only hope They--the Republican party--- had.

and, you know, she was not wrong. But this is where George W. Bush comes in and it is the best thing I can ever say for him. His election, even his nomination, was a sign of how low the country had sunk. With all of the truly repulsive things written about a woman I so much want to represent me in the United States Senate, the daughter of the President who inspired me and so many others into public service, the idea that George W. Bush could be seriously considered as the presidential nominee of major political party (as opposed to Senator John McCain, a bona fide war hero) much less elect him as president over the obviously qualified Vice President of the United States whose major deficiency was that he was sort of boring, is sickening.

The idea that some nobody, who was known mostly as the son of a former president, not a great one at that, and whose name might have fooled five or six people into thinking that it was the former president who was the candidate, not his ne'er do well son, is breathtaking in its cynicism (right up there with the "they're all the same" which was popular in some circles at the time) was, I have argued before,(here, for instance) a product of the presidencies of Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan which put the thought that anyone could be president into the public mind.

As horrible as his election was, as many deaths as it caused, as much damage it has caused to this country and the world, his election finally and irrevocably proved this was false. I suppose the many revisionists in the press and among broadcasters may someday convince people that G W Bush was actually "beloved" as they have done by changing the history of President Reagan's sad second term into the fictitious story of the Great Reagan, but I doubt it. Instead, his presidency is being described by the chief of staff to the first Secretary of State he appointed as an administration with a

confluence of characters--and I use that term very carefully--that included people like Powell, Dick Cheney, Condi Rice, and so forth, which allowed one perception to be "the dream team." It allowed everybody to believe that this Sarah Palin-like president--because, let's face it, that's what he was--was going to be protected by this national-security elite, tested in the cauldrons of fire.

The movers and shakers, its acolytes in what passes for journalism these days, and, I think and hope, the voters themselves, will not long forget the lesson learned once again. If Herbert Hoover, with all of his pre-presidential experience, was not equipped for the presidency, some fool plucked out of nowhere, with not one public utterance prior to his campaign showing the slightest interest in the welfare of the country or the world, or any ideas about how to contribute to solving its problems, will likely lead to disaster.

And so, with just the briefest summary, the country is attacked while the President reads to schoolchildren having done nothing about the prospect of such an attack in the month after being warned something like it was imminent, then allowed the intelligence communities to be browbeaten into agreeing that the attack on our country warranted a retaliatory action against a different country, whose leaders had names which sounded a bit like those of the people who attacked us, two hurricanes wipe out enormous swaths of the southeast while said president celebrates his birthday, commenting later that the shockingly unqualified person he put in charge of disaster relief was doing "a great job" though the entire country knew otherwise, and ending with the should have been expected result of dismantling the regulations put in place by President Roosevelt to protect against another economic collapse following the one which took place during the Hoover administration.

And, whether the candidate nominated by the Democratic Party was somewhat African-American or not, if he prayed at a church where the pastor said incendiary things or not, if his middle name was the same one as that of the leader of the country we attacked rather than go after the people who attacked us, if he was seen as soft on something about which people wanted him to be more belligerent, even if he appeared as a terrorist on a New Yorker cover, he would be elected by a country that had its bleeping eyes ripped open.

No matter what.

Don't listen to Pat Buchanan ever, but particularly when he tries to claim that Senator McCain was about to win before the market started to crash in September, and the financial bailout seemed to be necessary. He wasn't. He got the bump that one gets when his party gets to be the last nominating convention, and when he introduces new face for the press and broadcasters to dwell upon, but, as the more astute of them pointed out at the time, the "fundamentals" had not changed, and the fundamental was that the Republicans nominated and got George W. Bush elected twice and no party that did that was going to get a third chance.

And, more importantly I hope, for the New Year and for our "new" country, it will be a long time, if ever, before we again elect some obviously unqualified person to the presidency. The Republican Party paid for the Hoover mistake for years and years: Democrats controlled Congress for all but two out of the next sixty years. We can only hope they will be equally punished again, but, more importantly, that our children will remember and pass on the lesson we have learned in these last eight, or maybe even these last 28 years.

If so, my hopes for 2008 as a great year to be fondly recalled through history, as 1932, 1860 and 1776 have been, will be realized.

Happy New Year.