Watching Hillary's camapaign suspension speech. I will always find her worldview and policies repellant, and she and Bill have run one of the tackiest public households in American politics. But she's grown a lot as a speaker. She sounds sincere. Her smile seems real. She seems confident and forthright and relaxed and very American in the best way.* (I'm kind of a sucker for that Gaboon viper combination of brown and teal for some reason, too.) I don't like feeling contempt for people, and I feel much less contempt for her now than I did even just a few months ago.

* Again, I'm talking about her demeanor. That part about how we have individual liberties, but what's REALLY COOL is when we gather into collectives, made my flesh crawl.

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Faye Wattleton looks great! (She's on the post mortem thing on CNN.) However, it's a sign of the times that the first thing I thought when I saw her was, She has a terrific surgeon! She can't have gotten that referral through Planned Parenthood.... But who knows? Maybe she's had no work done and those long bangs are just a style.

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Mmmm...Bavarian Creme.

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I wish people would read more carefully. It would eliminate so very much unnecessary unpleasantness from life. A few days ago, Megan McArdle wrote:

Even if you don't like Barack Obama, I think you should be happy that the country has, with really very little fuss, nominated a black man with a very good shot at the presidency. (I didn't support Clinton, but I would have been glad to know that we could nominate a woman--not that I'm saying this is the reason we didn't nominate her.)

Bill Quick at Daily Pundit replied waspishly:

Megan is simply being racist here - it doesn't matter what Obama espouses, we should be happy because we nominated a black man. Should we be happy if the black man was Al Sharpton? Reverend Wright? Just because they are black?

I understand what Megan is trying to get at - that nominating any black man without rioting in the streets or the media is a sign of some kind of national maturity, or the true state of racism in the US - not very strong - but happiness is not a word I’d use to describe my feelings about an Obama nomination.

"We should be happy because we nominated a black man" is at least within spitting distance of what McArdle wrote, and IIRC, she is, in fact, an Obama supporter. But she wasn't talking about being happy with Obama as an individual candidate. She was talking about being happy that, in the blink of a historical eye after the Civil Rights Act, we actually have a black presumptive presidential nominee in one of the two major parties.

What's the problem with that? I say this as a libertarian who supported and still supports the Iraq occupation and who lived in East Asia for twelve years. The prospect of an Obama presidency scares the bejeezus out of me. And even if his greenness didn't scare me, I'd be opposed to his political principles, such that one can divine them. I think lots of his supporters have been cutting him slack that they would not cut for another candidate because they're eager to participate in the healing gesture of nominating a black candidate. Yes, I do.

However, he's the pioneer, and the progress made by pioneers tends to be rough. Presidential politics is not a forum in which we're yet become accustomed to seeing black people (or, to a lesser extent, women). Because we've just watched Obama and Clinton duke it out for the Democratic nomination, it's going to be easier for the first small-government, classical-liberal minority or woman candidate to be considered on policy merits rather than demographic "history-making." I don't think that pointing that out makes anyone racist.

So, good on Obama. Now let's make sure--please--that he doesn't become president.

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I want to hug my air conditioner. I want to give it a foot massage and a scalp massage and feed it peeled grapes from a silver salver and clasp its head to my chest and whisper that it's the only thing in this world that I can rely on to have my true happiness at heart.

And it's only the beginning of June.

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I didn't post on the D-Day anniversary, but Eric did.

I'm a libertarian; I'm used to being unsatisfied with election results, even when the candidates I voted for win.

I did not vote for Obama. I don't agree with his policies, and I don't sympathize with his view of the world. But most politicians, no matter what you think of them while they're campaigning, have a way of turning into windsocks once elected. Time will tell what he does with the office. In a few months, he'll be our president, and I wish him the best.

Added on 5 November: I'm glad to see Connie and Dean posting them, but do people really need to be told these things? Reading the comments here, I guess so.

A related point: I'm disturbed at the complaints that seem to imply that Obama was elected because of the media or his cult-creating mind rays. Yes, the media were shilling for him shamelessly. Yes, a lot of his most fervent admirers seemed to be working themselves into the sort of ecstasies that have no business surfacing anywhere outside church or a performance at the opera.

But it's our job as citizens to seek out information. Ours. Those who wanted to read his memoirs critically were able to do so. Those who wanted to find information about Bill Ayers and the Chicago Annenberg Challenge were able to do so. Those who wanted to know what the historical record says about social-democratic policy were able to do so. I'm not absolving CNN of its transgressions, only saying that it demeans our fellow citizens to imply that they needed to be spoonfed the truth. Some people are fully aware that Obama's longer on charisma than on policy, and they hope that's enough because they recognize that a lot of the most pressing issues of the day are going to have to go through congress anyway. Others decided that he would be the less deleterious choice in the long run despite disliking quite a bit of what he stands for. And finally, some people persist in believing that the Third Way will somehow work if we get it right this (twelve millionth) try.

I don't agree, but that doesn't mean that large segments of the electorate were brainwashed by Wolf Blitzer and Andrea Mitchell. If we're going to argue that people should be expected to earn their own way in society, surely we can expect them to use Google, on a terminal at the public library if necessary.

Having now criticized my own side a bit, let me get back to the more fun project of criticizing the opposition. I agree that the election of a black president is a moving, historic moment. It was one thing to know that it was theoretically possible, because we all said that we were worried about policy and character and not skin tone. It's another thing entirely to see America actually show that someone's non-whiteness would not prevent his being voted in. It's the difference between the hopeful belief that you're good enough for your beloved and actually having your marriage proposal accepted. I get it. In and of itself, that's a good thing. And this is an American election. so of course it's American racial history that we're using as context to judge it.

At the same time, could we just every once in a while show some knowledge of the wider world here? Racism and ethnocentrism are the norm in human history, not some rebarbative Yankee aberration. The United States did not invent ethnic tensions, and it was not even the last country to outlaw slavery. To outsiders from nations that have traditionally been more ethnically homogeneous, our noisy, front-and-center conversation on race looks like unrest and a chronic inability to get along, but that's exactly backwards. In America, arguing is what we do. Our periods of glazed-over gentility such as the 1950s tend to arise from external circumstances and be short-lived. American mouthiness and rough-and-tumble debate cause more immediate bruising, but they've helped us to advance organically through our racial and ethnic problems much better than the Europeans, Asians, and Africans that so many left-of-center people think we should be genuflecting to.