Those years are like bookends to our times, when one period of American life ended and another began.
After Democrats held the White House for 28 out of 36 years, the ground shifted in 1968 and, for 28 of the following 40, Republicans took control.
In 1968, Richard Nixon promised to "Bring Us Together" just as, four decades later, Barack Obama offers "Change."
Back then, Democrats were losing their grip on power after a disastrous war and years of domestic upheaval that were stirring fears about social stability in the face of new ideas about gender, race and conventional morality.
Now the Bush years have discredited the backlash of neo-con politics that brought another miserable military misadventure and the rollback of many hard-won individual rights in the name of keeping us safe from terror.
Once again, American politics are at a turning point and, even in the midst of economic misery, Barack Obama embodies hope for something better than what we have had for a long time.
His freshness and confidence are polar opposites of the qualities with which Nixon ushered in his era of reviving ancient grudges and reacting to the world with paranoia.
Party politics and ideologies aside, in the face of unprecedented challenges, Americans are once again ready for something new and better, and it's possible for even the old and jaded to believe that this time we are going to get it.
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2 comments:
How is the coming one party state a better condition? What are voters who want fiscal restraint and a smaller governmetn suppose to do in the coming one party state America?
also, as the U.S. becomes a one party state, the U.S. plans on attempting something that has never been done before, try to be a welfare state at the same time that it maintains open borders and unlimited immigration.
Ask yourself what level of taxes the children currently in kindergartetn will have to be paying to maintain open borders, a high level of government services, and to pay interest to the Chinese and arabs on the ten trillion plus national deficit?
The Illinois Governor may well be found guilty of a crime/s but for now he is innocent and has every right to appoint Burris. More relevantly, Blagojevich arguably is no more representative of venality than any one of the hundreds of other so-called people's representatives - it was just that he happened to be a little less injudicious than most others.
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