Brad DeLong rejoices in the coming return to…business as usual…

For the first time since the end of 1994, we can have normal politics and policymaking–can discuss what policies are best for America, and what America should be.

You see, from the end of 1994 to the end of 2000, the Republican congressional majority’s single fixed idea was that nothing should happen that could be portrayed as a success for Bill Clinton. And from the end of 2000 to today, the executive branch was controlled by a gang of malevolent, immoral, and destructive thugs that have disgraced the United States of America.

We can finally have normal politics and policymaking again. That’s not a tremendous accomplishment, is it?

It feels like one…

Yes.  Yes it does.  Or will…when I can get around to feeling it myself.  Having lived under the cloud of republican party radicalism for decades now, it’s going to be hard to come back out of the bomb shelter, so to speak, and look around without feeling nervous. 

If you want to know what Barack Obama’s magic was, it was simple.  He ran as a democrat.  In the New York Times, columnist Roger Cohen writes…

Beyond Iraq, beyond the economy, beyond health care, there was something even more fundamental at stake in this U.S. election won by Barack Obama: the self-respect of the American people.

For almost eight years, Americans have seen words stripped of meaning, lives sacrificed to confront nonexistent Iraqi weapons and other existences ravaged by serial incompetence on an epic scale.

Against all this, Obama made a simple bet and stuck to it. If you trusted in the fundamental decency, civility and good sense of the American people, even at the end of a season of fear and loss, you could forge a new politics and win the day.

Four years ago, at the Democratic convention, in the speech that lifted him from obscurity, Obama said: “For alongside our famous individualism, there’s another ingredient in the American saga: a belief that we are connected as one people.”

He never wavered from that theme. “In this country, we rise or fall as one nation, as one people,” he declared Tuesday night in his victory speech to a joyous crowd in Chicago.

But this is the democratic party ideal in a nutshell ever since FDR. 

It is nothing new.  What’s different this time, is that a democrat actually ran on it.  Republicans have been trying to utterly destroy FDR’s New Deal ever since he passed away toward the end of the great war he had guided the nation through.  But this is still FDR’s America.  His vision that we are all one America, whether rich or poor, factory or farm worker or white collar manager, eastern, western and everywhere in between, still resonates with us. 

It is the American dream, that diverse people of many faiths, descendants of many nations, can still be a people in spite of their differences, because of a shared vision of liberty and justice for all.  The tragedy of my lifetime is that the democratic party came to believe decades of republican propaganda, that America was not one nation after all, but a winner-take-all playing field where only the most ruthless, the most greedy, could win if they carved out of it just the right voter block.

And all it took to crush them, was someone willing to take up the dream again, and remind us what it was once upon a time, to still believe in it…

In that four-year span, Obama never got angry. Without breaking a sweat, he took down two of the most ruthless political machines on the planet: first the Clintons and then the Republican Party.

An idea has power. John McCain had many things in this campaign, but an idea was not one of them. At a time of economic crisis, he could not order his thoughts about it. Hard-hit Ohio drew its decisive conclusions. It was not alone.

McCain flailed, opting on a whim for a sidekick, Sarah Palin, who personified the very “country-first” intolerance and Bush-like small-mindedness of which many Americans had grown as weary as the world has.

The divisions the republicans have been sowing in the amber waves won’t be soon healed.  But now we can begin a start on it.  People Are tired of it.  Not everyone surely.  The christianists.  The bigots.  The greedy.  But they have always been the hangers-on.  There is an aching in the land for a way out of the culture wars, and a return to business as usual.   That’s where we can make a start.  At last.  At long last.