DAZED AND CONFUSED

Some of you might be confused and perhaps bitter about the elation over the election of Obama. It has been a long time in the wilderness for liberals and it is very difficult to explain the frustration that we have felt especially during the eight years of GW Bush .

With the ascendancy of Ronald Reagan almost 30 years ago (and that's a long time) Americans began to gang up on one another and public discourse deteriorated. The evangelical, religious right gained power and draped their view of life on earth over the political landscape. Those who did not see things as they did were godless, unamerican, communist, terrorist, socialist (whatever their enemy happened to be at any given time). The conservative movement embraced these people and their leaders with the intent of using them to maintain their control. Wedge issues were employed by the Republican Party to further divide people, and the "southern strategy" introduced by Nixon in 1968 was refined and brought to new heights. (Willie Horton, Jesse Helms commercials in NC for example) Newt Gingrich moved to the head of the line by raising money for and pursuing the election of any Republican who would go along with his program. He used innuendo and false charges to defeat many excellent members of Congress. He made Congress a venue for yelling, accusing, deriding. Many moderate members left the House and Senate because good sense had vanished . More than anything, the end of the "fairness doctrine" put the final nail in the coffin of bi-partisanship. The advent of talk radio and Fox News made mean acceptable. It was okay to deride people who did not go along with the conservative agenda. Public education was ridiculed along with teachers. Any newspaper, magazine, network, or reporter, was accused of being biased if they in any way presented information that went against the conservative mantra. If the truth did not verify their point of view, they simply discounted the truth. Prejudice and hate, were glorified by Limbaugh, Boortz, O'Reilly, Hannity. Their followers never questioned what they said, they never looked into an issue to see if there was another side...they never went against anything these people said. There was liberal talk radio and there were liberal "screamers", but they never seemed to gain a following that could match that of the right. Any electoral method was legitimate if it lead to a republican victory. Redrawing congressional districts to ensure republican victory, making sure secretaries of state were partisan hacks to manipulate the outcome of elections, packing the courts with "judges" who would verify the "right" way. Local governments, school boards and county commissions, across the country became the breeding grounds for the conservative tsunami.

The political pendulum slowly moves from left to right and back again. It has swung back to the left evidenced not only by the election of Barack Obama and the increased Democratic majority in the Congress, but by the fading red and look of Blue up and down K Street, even big Pharma has moved left. Hopefully, this turn to the left will be more humane than the rightward shift in 1980. Hopefully, Obama will usher in an era of tolerance and progressive improvements. We will not be the country we were in the 1950's, (do we want to really be there anyway?) but we can be better than we have been in the last eight years.