The huge, historic shift that Obama's impending victory will signify.

1932, 1968, 1980... 2008

If the next two weeks fail to produce yet another astonishing change, we are on the verge of an Obama landslide that will also produce a Democratic landslide in the congressional elections. This will be not merely an electoral event but a watershed election, one of the infrequent but profoundly altering basic changes in American political history.

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When the Republicans returned to power in 1952, after 20 years in the wilderness, the Eisenhower administration endorsed rather than reversed Democratic governance using an economically engaged state. And then the Kennedy/Johnson years saw a revitalization of the activist state, with a serious War on Poverty producing a plethora of new federal institutions. Unfortunately, Lyndon Johnson sank his popularity with a shooting war in Asia, and anger with him and the Democrats produced Richard Nixon in 1968. While Nixon did not reverse every element of the Johnson policies, he ran against Washington and set the political ground for a reversal of the state interventionist policies that had been dominant since 1932.

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It is the economic crisis that will make 2008 another watershed election. Circumstances will drive Obama and the Democratic congress to the left. An interventionist state is returning with a rush; Reaganite, anti-state, deregulated capitalism, it is now clear, is a catastrophe and a dead letter. A new era has begun.

This time the Republicans have adapted to the economic and political sea change even before they have left office. In dire straits, somewhat reluctantly following the British lead, the Goldman Sachs element of finance capitalism that runs the W. treasury has signed on to massive state intervention, and a bewildered Congress agreed. Henry Paulson et al are of course saving themselves through state intervention -- Keyensianism in the foxhole -- but such rapid reformulation of their self-interest proves my point.

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Barack Obama will preside over this change, and he will raise the taxes of the rich, punish a whole raft of corporate thieves, and begin a true national health care system. This will not be another Clintonian endorsement of Reaganism but a reversal of its premises and policies.

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Barack Obama never has articulated exactly what he means by Change. History is doing it for him.


http://thetyee.ca/Views/2008/10/20/ObamaChange/

I hoped that I'd live long enough to see the pendulum swing back. I had no idea it would come so fast. Trust Bush to F up in record time.