The Conservative Wins Again! Barack Obama by a Landslide

Here is the irony of this endless Presidential campaign, and the reason why Senator Obama is likely to win with an electoral landside: the election has been pitched to the world as a transformative moment in which the old, conservative, white establishment is finally overtaken by the new multicultural, post-racial America. Breathtaking! A triumph of existential radicalism.
But the reality is Senator Obama is playing the role of soothing and familiar conservative, allaying the national hysteria and soothing the fevered American brow - promising prudent judgment and deliberate change; while Senator McCain plays out the role of careening radical in whom whimsy has displaced judgment.

With his soothing half hour infomercial, his masterful and quiet approach to the economic crisis, and his highly disciplined campaign, it is Obama who has become the "trusted one," the "calm one," the "prudent one" with whom voters now can feel safe. The very qualities that a year ago most people thought no black man could bring to the country.

After all, in the stereotype, blacks were supposed to be angry, resentful, full of fire and brimstone, like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton and the Reverend Jeremy Wright with whom his opponents tried to link Obama.

Yet Senator Obama has turned out to be the very contrary of all this: thoughtful, unexcitable, soothing. It is John McCain, pulled around the country by his angry pit bull Sarah Palin, who seems erratic, ungrounded, on the edge of hysteria. Not what the nation is looking for in these days of global economic crisis.

Obama's election will appear to the world as a brave and bold decision by Americans to leap beyond race to a new world of multiculturalism. But in truth it will be a tribute to caution and prudence -- a 'conservative' choice to send the maverick radicals home, and put the cautious and reflective man of good judgment in the White House.