Campaign-Promises.com

WASHINGTON ‚Äì Over and over, Barack Obama told voters if they stuck with him “we will change this country and change the world.” They did, and now their expectations for him to deliver are firmly planted on his shoulders. Many supporters greeted his victory with euphoria.

Impatient for a new American era and overcome by a black man’s historic ascension to the White House, they took his achievement for their own ‚Äî weeping, dancing in the streets, blaring happy horns into Wednesday morning.

But campaign rhetoric soon collides with the gritty duties of governing, and hard realities stand in Obama’s way.

The youthful president-elect appears to know this. His victory speech emphasized humility far more than his fabled confidence, with remarks heavily leavened by references to the difficulties before the nation.

He declared “change has come to America” and closed with his “yes we can” campaign slogan, but not before speaking of the certainty of setbacks. “The road ahead will be long,” Obama warned. “We may not get there in one year or even one term.”

Atop Obama’s challenge list is the global and domestic turmoil that he inherits. None of it is his own making, but it will shape his presidency before he lifts one finger.

The worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Two wars in unstable, hostile lands. Other foreign hot spots such as Pakistan and Congo, nuclear standoffs with North Korea and Iran. A warming planet.

Then there are high health care and energy costs, sunken home values, wiped-out retirement and investment accounts. A federal deficit that is exploding as the nation throws money at its economic problems, sure to crimp Obama’s ability to spend his way to solutions.

He also faces challenging political realities.

Obama has a largely liberal voting record and owes a debt to the left wing of the Democratic Party, which mobilized millions on his behalf. These folks embraced his promises to end the Iraq war, move toward universal health care coverage and address harsh terrorist interrogation practices.

But Obama also appealed to the broader electorate as a pragmatist who pledged virtually party-blind government. He will have to decide whether it is better to disappoint the more liberal troops out of the gate or wait until later.

“A lot of people are not going to be happy in the first two years,” said Democratic strategist Joe Trippi.

Matt Bennett of the center-left group Third Way said that Obama is for centrist ideas such as middle-class tax cuts and seems likely to wait on contentious goals such as overhauling the U.S. health care system.

“We do believe him when he says he’s a moderate,” Bennett said. “We think that’s how he’s going to govern.”

Once the changeover happens, those who believed his “change we can believe in” slogan will want things to move quickly.

How might he go about it?

Even after nearly two years in the spotlight, little is understood about the 47-year-old first-term senator’s approach to leadership. His resume: community organizer, eight years as state legislator, and less than four as U.S. senator.

As a lawmaker, he has displayed a knack for working with Republicans on a handful of favorite issues. But he has devoted most of his time in the Senate to running for president. Unlike the past seven presidents, he was never a governor or vice president. And unlike John F. Kennedy, the last senator to move directly to the presidency, Obama has not commanded troops in wartime.

Personally, he’s a bit of an enigma, too.

He did lead his campaign, a huge, nearly billion-dollar operation. Throughout, he showed himself to have a detached, cerebral decision-making style that can sometimes seems out of sync with his natural charisma.

He also showed himself to be a highly disciplined, CEO-style manager. The leak-proof, tightly managed and orderly Obama operation mimics the Bush White House, and flows from “No Drama Obama” himself ‚Äî a man so focused that he didn’t give himself a day off from working out, even the morning after winning the presidency.

In keeping with his measured demeanor, Obama did nothing flashy his first day as president-elect, keeping to breakfast with his family and a thank-you visit to campaign workers.

All that said, he’s got plenty of things in his favor.

First and foremost, he was elected exactly the way he wanted to be — in an electoral landslide. He took not only traditionally Democratic states, but once-solid Republican territory too. That allows him to claim, credibly, a broad mandate for his ideas.

So the Democrats who run Capitol Hill, for all their savvy in the ways of Washington and potential disagreements with their president, might think twice about clashing too aggressively with him. On a more practical level, they will not want to risk missing out during the midterm election cycle two years from now on Obama’s eye-popping fundraising skills.

Further, the much-vaunted technological side of Obama’s campaign means he could appeal directly to voters around recalcitrant lawmakers, using e-mail, text messages, Facebook and other tools.

Said Trippi, “I would not like to be a member of Congress standing in the way of passing his energy bill.”

Still, Obama’s honeymoon with the public ‚Äî both anxious and hopeful ‚Äî could be fragile.

One of the many revelers who spontaneously flocked to the White House after Obama’s win, chanting, screaming and waving signs like, “Why Wait? Evict Bush Now,” summed it up.

“I came down here to make a prayer … that we’ll be able to change the nation and the world,” said Hollis Gentry.

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Associated Press writers Deb Riechmann and Charles Babington contributed to this story.

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President-Elect Barack Obama in Chicago

Popularity: 33% [?]

PITTSBURGH – The meteorologists tell us that Wednesday morning in southwestern Pennsylvania’s largest city will be crisp and sunny with a high of 64. That’s about all we know. Being a weather forecast, it offers nothing about the political climate that will have been created by the election the day before.

The outlook is obvious but often overlooked: In a deeply divided nation, on the first dawn after we choose a new leader, every ray of victory’s sunshine brings a corresponding thundercloud of defeat and bitterness.

“There are going to be a whole bunch of people who are distraught and who won’t know what to do ‚Äî no matter which side wins,” says Chris Ivey, 36, a Pittsburgh filmmaker and ardent Barack Obama supporter. “People will try to go back to their routine, but there’s going to be a lot of soul-searching to do.”

On Wednesday, roughly half of Americans will awaken to find that the horse they backed disappointed them. That presumes we even have an immediate result; don’t forget 2000, when America had to wait more than a month.

Jokes about moving to Canada
Yet there is, in the national conversation, surprisingly little talk about not accepting the winner if things don’t go your way. Sure, some Democrats joke about moving to Canada, but gauging the severity of responses on the day after is a gauzy exercise in tarot-card reading that even television’s loudest mouths rarely discuss.

While the spectrum of possible morning-after reactions runs from water-cooler grousing to partisan lawyering to violence, the depth of sentiment this year — more impassioned, many say, than even the last two elections — could make for a bumpy ride, particularly if the results are close.

This is, after all, the culmination of a political season that saw people weeping at rallies, schoolchildren taking sides and, in one case, a teenager getting shot after trying to remove a sign for John McCain from an Ohio lawn. As David Gergen, a White House adviser during the Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Clinton administrations and now a CNN analyst said on air a couple of weeks ago: “We’ve got a country now that we’re sneering at each other across cultural lines.”

Will blacks, craving a victory that could offset the albatross of American racism, accept a negative outcome? Will Christian conservatives who got so energized about Sarah Palin reject the system and grow isolated if she’s sent back northward? Will “real America” accept a victory by “Eastern elites,” or vice versa? How will Hillary Rodham Clinton’s supporters ‚Äî and the Clintons themselves ‚Äî emerge from it all?

And the question no one wants to articulate: Will anyone unhappy with the outcome resort to uglier methods of registering disapproval?

Ask around and you’ll find partisans casting about to figure out how they’ll cope with an undesired outcome.

Nation above politics
If Obama wins, says southwestern Virginian and McCain backer Steve Nagel, he’ll put nation above politics. “I’m not going to do anything to undermine him,” Nagel said last week at a Palin rally in Salem, Va., “I’ll support the country.” Nearby, though, Julie Thornton of Roanoke expressed trepidation at Democrats’ reaction should McCain prevail. “I’m hoping they’ll be civil,” she said, “but I’m worried.”

On the same night a couple hundred miles south, at a rally for Joe Biden in Greensboro, N.C., Obama backer Maureen Mallon wasn’t as sanguine. “If we don’t get this one right, we ain’t ever going to get it right,” she said.

‘Catastrophic problem for me ‘
“Honestly, we’ve got a plan,” Mallon said. Her husband looked at her and nodded. “I’ve got family in Ireland,” she said. “I don’t feel a part of my country if McCain wins.”

Passions are high, too, in the second-largest city in divided Pennsylvania. Pittsburgh is full of neighborhoods where geography doesn’t necessarily dictate political stripe. It’s not uncommon to see intersections like the one in the city’s Morningside neighborhood, where McCain and Obama signs face off across the street from each other in a silent political High Noon. That means that come Nov. 5, someone’s going to wake up agitated.

“I can’t imagine the level of despair we would feel,” said Kyra Straussman, 45, of Pittsburgh, an Obama supporter who works in real estate. “Let me put myself there for one minute: McCain is president. Catastrophic problem for me in every way you could think about it ‚Äî culturally, spiritually, financially.”

John Hinshaw, a historian at Lebanon Valley College in central Pennsylvania, sees a couple things that could dictate the aftermath of Election Day ‚Äî one aggravating and one mitigating. He says that many people profess after the fact to have voted for the winner even if they didn’t, thus leavening the strong reaction.

Perception of unfairness is problematic
But if voters perceive unfairness, which can happen in both thin margins and landslides, that can be a serious problem. “People can say, `It’s not my president. It’s your president,’” he says. “And that’s the kind of stuff that can really weaken nation-states.”

Lebanon Valley is one of three institutions doing a study this year on the emotional intensity of the election, comparing people’s expectations to their reactions afterward. A similar study done for the 2000 election showed that people who expected to be inconsolable if Al Gore lost actually felt OK when it happened.

“We have tremendous powers to make it seem to ourselves like it turned out the way we thought it was going to,” said psychologist Michael Kitchens, who is co-leading this year’s study.

If, in the end, Americans are having trouble reconciling their feelings on the morning after, we might consider Return Day, a tradition in Biden’s home state of Delaware.

On Thursday, candidates for office — winners and losers — will gather and ride down the streets of Georgetown, Del., together before thousands of people to show that divisiveness need not endure after the election. They even bury a symbolic hatchet.

“All the ill feelings and harsh remarks, all of that is buried in there, and everybody agrees to put aside their partisanship and work together,” says Debbie Jones, one of the organizers. “It’s something everybody could use.”

Reality or wishful thinking, that’s part of America’s self-image as a land of strong competitors who, in the end, draw together to move forward.

“I respect the process at the end of the day. That’s the best part about it,” said Kevin Bierschenk, 31, a Republican and a telecommunications project manager in Herndon, Va. “Good losers,” he said, “are just as good as a good winner.”

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On Tuesday the nation’s fretful, hopeful voters will finally have their say, and none of the rigorously calibrated polls or demographically incisive analysts out there can tell us with any certainty what will happen.

Will one candidate win by millions, or lose by thousands? If there is a clear victor, will he be the first black American ever elected to the presidency, or the oldest American ever to win a first term?

We don’t need to know the answers to be certain of this much: no matter the outcome, it will be the climax of one of the most extraordinary presidential elections in this nation’s 232-year history, and “the first” and “the oldest” capture only some of what has made it so remarkable.

Whether judged by the milestones reached, the paradigms challenged, the passions stirred or simply the numbers — the 85 percent of Americans who believe the country is on the wrong track, or the record-demolishing $640 million fund-raising mark that Barack Obama passed by mid-October — the election of 2008 actually warrants the sorts of adjectives and phrases that are often just journalistic tics: epochal, pivotal, historic, once-in-a-lifetime.

It’s been so rich with precedent and incident — and so very, very long — that we have, if anything, undervalued and even lost sight of its significance at times. In these final hours there’s some sense in pausing, pulling back and taking the broad measure of a contest that’s sure to affect not only this country’s civic life but also its emotional and psychological landscape for some time to come.

Much of its impact boils down, yes, to race and gender, Mr. Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton and Sarah Palin, who could become the nation’s first female vice president.

In this fiercely waged election, longstanding barriers were challenged and toppled, at times to the seeming surprise of the person doing the toppling.

Think back. When Mr. Obama took the stage in Iowa after his victory in the state’s caucuses last January, he was not yet the favorite for the Democratic nomination, and he was a long way from becoming the general-election frontrunner.

In videotape from that night, you can see and sense an astonishment and exhilaration — in him, around him — that seem almost quaint just 10 months later.

“They said this day would never come,” he tells a euphoric Iowa crowd, and not just his eyes but the whole of him twinkles, gleams. “They said our sights were set too high.”

While he’s talking specifically about himself and his campaign troops, it’s impossible not to hear in his words a statement about all minorities in America, for whom the week-by-week, month-by-month advance of his candidacy would hold an especially powerful message.

The writer Ta-Nehisi Coates observed that as Mr. Obama’s quest for the presidency caught fire, “I knew, for the first time in my life, that it would be a good year to be black.”

“Consider this fact: the most famous black man in America isn’t dribbling a ball or clutching a microphone,” Mr. Coates continued, in a recent essay for Time magazine. “He has no prison record. He has not built a career on four-letter words.”

‚ÄúWords like hope, change and progress might seem like na?Øve campaign sloganeering in a dark age,‚Äù Mr. Coates further wrote. ‚ÄúBut think of the way those words ring for a people whose forebears marched into billy clubs and dogs, whose ancestors fled north by starlight, feeling the moss on the backs of trees.‚Äù

Over the course of a campaign that was part therapy session, part consciousness-raising seminar, a few of the principal players took on meanings much, much larger than themselves. Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton became vessels for the aspirations and frustrations of entire classes of aggrieved Americans. Their journeys encouraged the airing of hurts and the discussion of difficult issues.

In Philadelphia in March, Mr. Obama delivered a set-piece speech that sought to do nothing less than explain centuries of racial enmity and move Americans past it. In New Hampshire in January, Mrs. Clinton welled with tears that became catalysts for a charged examination of the treatment of women in American life.

Was sexism more potent than racism? This was the sort of impossible question raised on television shows and in newspapers, at restaurant counters and kitchen tables, revolving around Senator Clinton in winter and spring, Governor Palin in summer and fall.

For many of Mrs. Clinton’s supporters she was Everywoman, called on to prove her toughness without wholly abandoning her softness, asked in the end to yield once more to an ambitious, impatient man. Come Tuesday, will these supporters be haunted anew by what might have been? And will they be haunted more by an Obama victory or an Obama defeat?

How will some younger voters react if Mr. McCain prevails? Or some older ones if Mr. Obama does? In recent weeks, the ire and ugly catcalls of some supporters of the McCain-Palin ticket have suggested a division in this election that goes well beyond tax policy or Iraq strategy.

There’s more generational, cultural and stylistic difference between Mr. McCain and Mr. Obama, ages 72 and 47, than between rivals in most presidential contests over the last half-century.

Bill Clinton and the first President Bush were three years closer in age, and while Mr. Clinton’s victory marked the ascension of baby boomers, Mr. Obama’s election would be emblematic of something more profound: that the multicultural, postracial society so often discussed in the news media but so seldom affirmed in public life was now, literally, the face of our nation. Mr. Clinton was Fleetwood Mac. Mr. Obama is India.Arie.

Candidates in many past presidential contests lacked life stories as compelling as those of Mr. Obama, the son of a man from Kenya and a woman from Kansas, and Mr. McCain, who endured years of imprisonment and torture in Vietnam.

But these two weren’t the only vivid characters in a campaign that, purely as narrative, proved sensational.

Who would have believed, at its start, that Mike Huckabee was going to outlast Rudy Giuliani? That John Edwards’s pledges of support for his seriously ill wife were going to give way to a public apology for infidelity?

That Mr. Obama would choose a running mate who once described him, in terms of plausible aspirants to the White House, as “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean?” That Mr. McCain would choose a running mate who could field-dress a moose and would take the stage at the Republican convention with a pregnant, unwed teenage daughter in tow?

Perhaps that’s one reason voters paid such close attention. In any case, the 2008 election contradicted any and all claims that Americans were alienated from politics.

Although cable news was supposed to be moribund, programs devoted to politics got some of their best ratings in years. “Saturday Night Live” sailed temporarily into prime time on the winds of political parody. An average of about 34.5 million viewers a night tuned into the Republican convention, versus 22.6 million in 2004. For the Democratic convention, viewership rose to an average of 30.2 million from 20.4 million four years ago.

“We’re seeing record levels of interest in the campaign,” said Michael P. McDonald, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and an associate professor at George Mason University who studies voting patterns. Mr. McDonald cited evidence like new voter registration and responses in polls that asked how interested in the election voters were.

And he extrapolated from that to predict turnout of 64 percent, which would be the highest since 1908, when, he said, 65.7 percent of those Americans eligible to vote did. He said that just under 64 percent voted in the Kennedy-Nixon election of 1960, adding that 2008 turnout could top that.

One of the most striking measures of voters’ engagement has been Mr. Obama’s fund-raising, built in large measure on small donations made over the Internet. The final total may well exceed $700 million. In the 2004 election, the presidential candidates combined raised $684 million before their conventions, after which President Bush and Senator John F. Kerry took public financing.

Only Mr. McCain did that this time, and as a condition has had to limit his spending between the convention and Election Day to $84 million. Mr. Obama broke an early promise to take public financing and thus evaded such limits. He spent $21 million on television advertising alone during one week in October.

If Mr. Obama wins by a wide margin on Tuesday, that victory will reflect more than strides in race relations, thirst for change and the strength of his appeal. It will also reflect the power of money, and it could usher in the end of general-election candidates participating in the public financing system.

An Obama victory could redraw the political map, patches of red becoming blue or at least purple, swaths of the South no longer conceded to Republicans from the start.

So many other assumptions have been upended already. A black man with an exotic-sounding name wasn’t supposed to flourish in an overwhelmingly white state like Iowa, but Mr. Obama beat Mr. Edwards and Mrs. Clinton there by 8 percentage points.

Someone who failed to win Democratic primaries in New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania, California, New York and New Jersey wouldn’t seem to be on a successful path to the Democratic nomination, but Mr. Obama was.

He hasn’t fit neatly into the usual paradigms, and that could manifest itself in some way in Tuesday’s voting — if this election, like the 1980 race between President Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, will reveal some new political dynamics and yield some new political alignments.

Are we still the center-right country we’ve heard so much about over the last decade? Mr. Obama’s success even to this point calls that into question, just as Mr. McCain’s triumph in the Republican primaries raises doubts about the putative sway of religious conservatives within — and beyond — his party. The 2008 election suggests an evolving body politic, not a palsied one.

Then again it’s hard to tell, because what may ultimately be most extraordinary about this election is its context. The country is facing what is widely regarded as the greatest financial crisis since the Depression, and that’s not just election-season hyperbole. America is fighting wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan. And its claim to global leadership is being undercut by Russia, which defied the will of the West in invading Georgia last summer, and China, which staged an Olympics that was the envy of the world.

The 2008 presidential election stands out from so many before it, and will have repercussions for so many after it, because it’s a decision about who can guide us through the worst of times. We’re in trouble if we get it wrong. And maybe even if we get it right.

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Barack Obama’s senior advisers have drawn up plans to lower expectations for his presidency if he wins next week’s election, amid concerns that many of his euphoric supporters are harbouring unrealistic hopes of what he can achieve.

The sudden financial crisis and the prospect of a deep and painful recession have increased the urgency inside the Obama team to bring people down to earth, after a campaign in which his soaring rhetoric and promises of “hope” and “change” are now confronted with the reality of a stricken economy.

One senior adviser told The Times that the first few weeks of the transition, immediately after the election, were critical, “so there’s not a vast mood swing from exhilaration and euphoria to despair”.

The aide said that Mr Obama himself was the first to realise that expectations risked being inflated.

In an interview with a Colorado radio station, Mr Obama appeared to be engaged already in expectation lowering. Asked about his goals for the first hundred days, he said he would need more time to tackle such big and costly issues as health care reform, global warming and Iraq. “The first hundred days is going to be important, but it’s probably going to be the first thousand days that makes the difference,” he said. He has also been reminding crowds in recent days how “hard” it will be to achieve his goals, and that it will take time.

“I won’t stand here and pretend that any of this will be easy – especially now,” Mr Obama told a rally in Sarasota, Florida, yesterday, citing “the cost of this economic crisis, and the cost of the war in Iraq”. Mr Obama’s transition team is headed by John Podesta, a Washington veteran and a former chief-of-staff to Bill Clinton. He has spent months overseeing a virtual Democratic government-in-exile to plan a smooth transition should Mr Obama emerge victorious next week. The plans are so far advanced that an Obama Cabinet has been largely decided upon, with the expectation that most of his senior appointments could be announced shortly after election day.

Yet Mr Obama and his aides are under no illusions about the size of the challenges the Democrat will inherit if he enters the Oval Office. Tom Daschle, the party’s former leader in the US Senate and a strong contender for the post of White House chief-of-staff in an Obama administration, said last month that the winner next week would have only a 50 per cent chance of winning a second term in 2012.

Not only will the next president take office with the country sliding into a potentially long recession — and mired in debt — but the challenges abroad are immense. There is an unfinished war in Iraq, a worsening situation in Afghanistan and an unstable and nuclear-armed Pakistan to contend with. Iran appears intent on acquiring the bomb and there remains the ever-present threat from al-Qaeda and Islamic extremists.

If he wins, Mr Obama will inherit a Democratic-controlled Congress, and might even have the benefit of a 60-seat filibuster-proof “supermajority” in the Senate. Such a scenario would allow him to push through legislation largely unfettered by Republican opposition. Yet it also means that should the country still be mired in recession in three years’ time, voters — who have short memories — will probably blame him and the Democrats on Capitol Hill. Those stakes have led Mr Obama to conclude that while expectations need to be tempered, big things need to be achieved very early in his first term, when he will still have the political capital to achieve some of his most ambitious legislative goals.

Having promised “real” change, the pressure will be on him to deliver. In the Colorado interview, Mr Obama added: “The next president has got to come quickly out of the box.”

The early priorities being lined up if he takes power are a mixture of symbolism and substance. He plans to make a major address in a big Muslim country early in his first term. Having pledged on the campaign trail to close Guantanamo Bay, he is also determined to make early moves to rid America of the controversial prison. Yet what to do with the remaining inmates looms as an intractable problem, as many of their home governments refuse to allow them to return.

Mr Obama’s first legislative goals will be to follow through on his pledge to cut taxes for the middle class and raise them for the wealthiest Americans, and to push through a hugely expensive Bill to provide near-universal health insurance.

Popularity: 32% [?]