Is This The Beginning of The End?

Has it come to this?

Obama, McCain both win. (Yawn.)

We have to remember that this is not bad given that four years ago, it was George Bush and John Kerry. Both Obama and McCain are the sort of leaders who have put integrity, leadership and vision on the table and are staking their claim to the most powerful job in the world on their ability to put things right. It may even be an election devoid of most of the crap and spin we have seen for years – given that the vending of crap and spin seems to have been one victim of the primaries.

Duller questions still await. Like “can a win in Ohio prolong Clinton’s demise?” Like “will Huckabee join in an unholy alliance with talk radio to place the simmering disloyalty of conservatism above the greater good?” Like, yawn, the VP candidate selection. But what does this all mean? Is this really an urban v. urban race. It appears also to be a center-right v. center-left or even left race. These are both new things to US politics. Interestingly, it may also be a fight between relative radicals, one with substance and one with something that looks like a couple of slogans: hope and change. A product of the 1960’s against an echo of that decade.

And the Votemaster points out that the actual election may not be such an even fight as the process to date might imply:

In a development that should make Republicans nervous, Obama got more votes (619,000) in Virginia than all the Republican candidates combined (485,000). In fact, the combined Democratic vote in Virginia was more than double the combined Republican vote. And this in a state that hasn’t voted Democratic in a Presidential election since 1964 when Lyndon Johnson wiped Barry Goldwater off the map. If the Democratic enthusiasm is running so high in places like Virginia, what’s going to happen in the general election in true swing states like Missouri, Iowa, New Mexico, and Colorado?

People are coming out for Obama. I’m not really sure why but, despite that, I was very tempted to nick one of his lawn signs, holdovers from the primary, that I saw down in New York over the weekend. An opportunity to grab a bit of what might be going on.