By electing its first African American, bi-racial president, America redefined itself. Barack Obama’s singular achievement has been, and will be for the ages, his election, and his confirming re-election. The significance of this cannot be overestimated. It colors all aspects of Obama’s presidency, as it tends to be publicly ignored. Today, at Obama’s second inauguration, he will highlight his and our achievement, as he will take his oath of office on the bibles of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr.

Of course, Obama is not just a pretty dark face. He has a moderate left of center political program. He is a principled centrist. He is trying to transform the American center, moving it to the left, informing commonsense, changing the story we tell ourselves about ourselves, re-inventing American political culture. This will clearly be on view in today’s speech.

Obama has changed how America is viewed in the larger world, as he has slowly but surely shifted American foreign policy, ending two wars, developing a more multilateral approach, reforming the American military in a way that is more directed to the challenges of the 21^st century. I should add: I am disappointed with some of this, particularly concerning drone warfare (more on this in a later piece). The President has finally established the principle of universal healthcare as a matter of American law, putting an end to a very unfortunate example of American exceptionalism. Another dark side of American life, the centrality of guns and gun violence in our daily lives, is now being forthrightly addressed by the President. His second term promises to address climate change in a way that has been foreclosed by the Republican opposition to this point. And he will almost certainly lead the country in a more tolerant and progressive approach to immigration and citizenship for undocumented Americans.

He has accomplished a big fuckin’ deal, as Vice President Biden declared in an unguarded moment following the passage of Obamacare (The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act) and today has been underscored by one of Obama’s primary critics from the left, Paul Krugman, the Nobel prize winning economist and New York Times columnist.

But in my judgment it all exists in the context of the redefinition of what it means to be an American. He now represents the typical American. His is the face of America and many of those who felt excluded, and not only African Americans, now feel that they are full citizens.  Take a look at this open public letter from a gay family attending the ceremonies today.

Lincoln turned the “Declaration of Independence” into a sacred text, when he redefined it in the Gettysburg Address. “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”  He elevated the ideal of equality, reinterpreting the significance of the “Declaration,” turning equality into a central political value. In the same way, Obama has redefined the significance of the motto on the American seal E pluribus unum, “out of many one,” into a central commitment to the diversity of national origins, religious, commitments, racial and ethnic identities and sexual orientations, elevating diversity, a central empirical fact of American society, into a central normative commitment, to be celebrated and cultivated. I anticipate that the theme of equality and diversity will animate his speech.

Now I listen to the speech and respond:

Extraordinary. More than I could have hoped, though I expected a lot. Comprehensive, principled, visionary, clearly setting out a (left of center) path for the country, embedded within a history, distant and recently passed. There was a noteworthy opening, centered on equality and diversity in American history. He engaged the politics of the day – climate change (with striking prominence), Social Security and Medicare, immigration, and women and gay rights -along the way, but it was the central vision that I found most powerful.

The audience was large and enthusiastic, fervently waving the American flag, red, white and blue, with resulting purple waves of enthusiasm. And Obama worked with this, presenting his vision that would unite, the liberal blue and the conservative red, moving the country in a progressive and more inclusive direction. Obama’s words soared.

He concluded with a series of paragraphs repeating the phrase “we the people.”

“We, the people, still believe that every citizen deserves a basic measure of security and dignity…

“We, the people, still believe that our obligations as Americans are not just to ourselves, but to all posterity…

“We, the people, still believe that enduring security and lasting peace do not require perpetual war…

“We will defend our people and uphold our values through strength of arms and rule of law…

“We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths – that all of us are created equal – is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall; just as it guided all those men and women, sung and unsung, who left footprints along this great Mall, to hear a preacher say that we cannot walk alone; to hear a King proclaim that our individual freedom is inextricably bound to the freedom of every soul on Earth.”

Obama addressed many policy issues, surprising instant pundits. But what was most noteworthy to me is that he did it by building upon and returning to his greatest accomplishment. It was a speech built upon the power of American diversity and outlined how this diversity will be used to address the pressing problems of the day, and as this happens, the United States stands as a city on a hill for others to observe and learn from. At least, this is the very ambitious promise of Obama’s second term.

Did they “2” it again? Only if they were Democrats.

As the 113^th Congress was sworn in many were pleased about the increased numbers of women in both houses. This was also true for the state legislatures, though not for all of them. While more women are welcome, it’s important to understand that this progress is one-sided, or more accurately, one-partied. In the 2012 election, Democratic women got a big boost. Republican women didn’t.

In January of 2013, women were 29 percent of the Democrats and 9 percent of the Republicans in both houses of Congress. Whereas women increased their presence in the Democratic Caucus from last year, they decreased their presence in the Republican Conference in both numbers and percentages.

After the 2012 election, the number of women Republicans elected to Congress went down twenty percent, from 24 to 20 in the House and from 5 to 4 in the Senate. The number of women Democrats increased by ten and twenty percent respectively, from 53 to 58 in the House and 13 to 16 in the Senate.

Something similar happened in the state legislatures. Republican women decreased their presence by 7 to 8 percent and the Democratic women increased theirs by 3 to 10 percent. As of January, 2013, women are 37 percent of all Democratic state house members and 28 percent of Democratic state senators. They are only 18 and 13 percent, respectively, of their Republican counterparts.

Two factors account for this: Women candidates do well in election years that end in “2.” Women candidates win when the Democrats win. What’s magical about “2” years is that the first legislative contests after the decennial reapportionment are held in those years. New districts create new opportunities. More seats are open — i.e. have no incumbent — in “2” years than in others, and even incumbents must appeal to new constituents within their new district lines.

This has been a factor only since the 1960s when the Supreme Court ruled that legislative districts had to be roughly equal in population. Until compelled to do so, many states did not change their legislative district lines, or even those of their Congressional districts. The members of the state legislatures who were charged with that duty liked to keep things as they were.

The modern women’s movement also emerged in the 1960s, and by 1972 public awareness was growing about the dismal lack of women in public office. Consciousness was raised by Rep. Shirley Chisholm’s campaign for President that year, even though she insisted that she was not running as the women’s candidate. The impact of the 1972 redistricting and the feminist movement could be seen in the 18.8 percent increase in the number of women sworn in as state legislators in 1973. The numbers were still tiny, but they continued to rise steeply for the next twenty years.

Women could respond so fast to the opportunities offered by the 1972 redistricting because they hadn’t been out of politics in the previous 50 years, just out of sight. Not only were women a significant majority of campaign workers, but organizations like the League of Women Voters had been training them to do legislative work for decades and implanting many with the idea that they could do it better inside the legislature.

In 1992, the number of women elected to Congress took a great leap upward, from 29 to 47 in the House and from 2 to 7 in the Senate. After crawling from two to six percent during the previous two decades, women were ten percent of the 103rd Congress.

Once again, redistricting created opportunity, but only where women were ready to take advantage of it. In the previous twenty years, women had gone from five to twenty-one percent of state legislators, a major source of Congressional candidates. The states which had elected women to the state legislatures in larger numbers began to elect them to Congress.

This increase was not bipartisan. The 1992 election brought a big increase in the number of Democratic women, but only a small one for Republicans. In the 1980s women had been a greater portion of Republican than Democratic members of Congress. The “party gap” this created in Congress had emerged a decade earlier in the state legislatures. In 1981, women were about 12 percent of both the Republican and Democratic state legislators. Their proportion among the Democrats rose slowly but steadily to over 31 percent in 2009. Among Republican state legislators the proportion of women rose more slowly, flattened out in the mid-1990s, and fell as the new century began. There are fewer Republican women serving in the state legislatures in 2013 than in 2000. There are ten percent more Democratic women.

The number of women state legislators peaked at 1,809 before the 2010 elections. When the voters favored the Republicans that year they reduced women’s presence. Many more Democratic women lost their seats than Republican women won theirs. They have not yet caught up.

There are many reasons why Republican women are less likely than Democratic women to become legislators. Some have to do with the voters; some with how each party recruits (or doesn’t recruit) its candidates. The bottom line is that hallelujahs for the greater number of women in the 113th Congress are coming a bit too early.

The Republicans elected to the state legislatures in 2010 were able to draw districts which will favor Republican candidates for the next decade. The type of voters who vote in the midterm elections are more likely to favor Republicans. That means that women’s progress into elected office will stall unless the Republican Party decides to practice a little affirmative action, or the voters swing heavily to the Democrats.

Now that it’s over, I’ve spent two days reading reactions to the election results on conservative media, from self-proclaimed highbrow platforms like National Review and Human Events to populist platforms like Free Republic. What I see everywhere I look are central and fundamental internal contradictions in the values of the American Right.

On the one hand, the Right maintains an originalist attachment to American-style democracy. One of the most common criticisms made by the Right is that there exist in the U.S. a number of groups (the Left, minorities, gays, atheists and secularists) that seek to impose a policy agenda on the public by non-democratic means—a bad thing, they implicitly argue. They further often argue that the American system has become too open to undemocratic forms of manipulation by these groups, and that the result is an undemocratic society far removed from the intentions of its founders.

At the same time, through two presidential election seasons (but particularly in this most recent one), the Right has also maintained that there are other fundamental “American” values that these groups do not share. Anyone that has paid nominal attention to the campaigns is familiar with this list: limited or no government, self-sufficiency, Judeo-Christian morality, a kind of rugged individualism, the right to bear arms, a kind of practical nativism (integration rather than multiculturalism, limits on immigration, and cultural and demographic change), a particular affirmative conception of religious freedom (that the separation of church and state must create a believer’s right to practice his or her faith according to the dictates of conscience even when this practice imposes constraints, within the context of the policy status quo, on the rights of others), and so on.

In the Right’s estimation, a changing American public simply does not embrace these values in the way that it once did—in better times. What is interesting to me is that this is seen not as a problem with which the Right must come to terms, but rather one that inheres in the public at large. Of particular interest is the discussion, amongst those that accept this fundamental premise, about what the Right ought to do in response to this state of affairs.

What I encountered consistently over the course of my post-mortem reading was the strong claim that the Right ought not to compromise, moderate, or modify its platform or positions to appeal more broadly to the public.

Whatever one thinks of the claim that the present Left coalition comprises a vast conspiracy of affinitive groups with anti-democratic tendencies and approaches to policy, the fact is that a majority of U.S. voters have (twice now) democratically endorsed this coalition and indeed belong to it.

The Left coalition’s rejection of many of the value positions endorsed by the Right can thus be argued to be a nominally democratic one. In simpler terms, the Right and their values have been out-numbered and out-voted democratically.

Even so, what I saw again and again in the election’s immediate aftermath was a determination by many on the Right to press ever forward—indeed, to focus on changes in strategy in an attempt to turn back or marginalize the Left and restore the previously discussed constellation of Right values to a central place in American policy, despite the clear opposition of a majority of the public to this.

The left coalition, far from being seen as a democratic quantity, was seen as embodying illegitimate values and voters that cannot be allowed to stand. Dozens of accounts suggested that because the Left values and policy were un-American or incompatible with essentially American mores, the broadness of the base of support for them is irrelevant, or even exemplary of the collapse of American society.

Too many Americans have become takers and activists for the normalization of various forms of deviance or low status, goes the trope; they will continue to vote for undemocratic practices and for policy that runs counter to “real” American values. A Right with integrity ought not to appeal to them. Quite the opposite, if America is to be “saved,” Right values must triumph at the ballot box despite the present majority. These positions, these ways of thinking, are self-contradictory.

Surely there are conservative values, Right values, that have broad appeal, or that can even be said to be nominally “universal” in nature. Ought not the American Right focus on these? I saw no argument (nor do I find any reason to believe) that appeals to universal aspirations and values are unlikely to find support across the electorate at large. Let those values and propositions without broad appeal fall away from the national platform and from centrality to the Right’s political project.

If, on the other hand, it is true that there are no values or policy positions on the Right that are universal, or even that are any longer palatable to the majority of the American public, then surely it is the Right, not the Obama Left coalition, that has embraced an undemocratic ethos so long as it continues to seek a place for these in governance. Surely, in this understanding of things, it is the Right that seeks to undermine the “freedom” (a word that has been constantly used, if not uncritically overused, by the Right) of the American public.

There is a choice to be made: the Right can eschew a universalist appeal of the kind that the Left has made on the grounds that such an appeal is incompatible with conservative values, or they can advocate for and embrace the democratic over the undemocratic, nominal “freedom” over the effectively authoritarian imposition of minority values and policy positions on the majority.But they can’t have it both ways without founding their understanding of democratic freedom on an essentially undemocratic a priori definition of what the “real” America is and who the legitimate public contains.

I believe that the victory of truth over truthiness is the most important result of the elections last week. The victory is beautifully documented in Frank Rich’s latest piece in New York Magazine. In my judgment, the defeat of truthiness is even more important than the victory of Barack Obama over Mitt Romney and the victory of the Democratic Party over the Republicans, important though these are. A sound relationship between truth and politics will provide for the possibility of American governability and progress, informed by both progressive and conservative insights.

To be sure, on the issues, foreign and domestic, and on various public policies, the differences between the two presidential candidates and their two parties were stark, clearly apparent now as the parties position themselves for the fiscal cliff. Yet, these differences pail in comparison to the importance of basing our political life on factual truths, (as I analyzed here) instead of convenient fictions (fictoids), and on careful principled (of the left and the right) judgments and not the magical ideological thinking offered by market and religious fundamentalists (as I also previously examined) and by various xenophobes and racists (who promise to take their country back).

Stephen Colbert, the great political philosopher and public intellectual, the leading expert on truthiness, disguised as a late night comic, has most clearly illuminated the truth challenge in his regular reports. His tour de force, in this regard, was his address to the White House press corps in George W. Bush’s presence. But now it no longer takes a brave comic genius to highlight the problem. Republican and conservative responses to election polling and results provide the evidence, both negative and positive.

Though the polls clearly predicted an Obama victory, it is noteworthy that the Republican leaders and their advisers really didn’t see the defeat coming. They operated in an ideological bubble, which facts did not penetrate. Now they must (more on their alternative courses in our next post by Aron Hsiao on Monday).

After all objective reports on election night indicated a decisive Obama victory, Romney wouldn’t concede. Karl Rove on Fox News comically refused to acknowledge what Fox News (Fox News!) projected. Before the election, Republican pollsters systematically distorted their election predictions to confirm their desired results. A fact denying normality had become the order of things. The right-wing politicians, and their media enablers, were not simply lying to the public. They were blinded by their own fabrications. There were the fortunate (from my point of view) miscalculations of the campaign, but when it came to science, to climate change, to biology and much more, fact denying had become deadly. Thankfully, there is now sensible resistance, by the population at large and also by conservatives themselves.

As reported by Jonathan Martin at Politico notable young conservatives are now presenting important criticism. Ross Douthat: “What Republicans did so successfully, starting with critiquing the media and then creating our own outlets, became a bubble onto itself.” Ben Domenech: “The right is suffering from an era of on-demand reality.” Such self-criticism is heartening. Perhaps, it will be possible for serious conservative intellectuals and public figures to present positions without the craziness.

Severely conservative Romney continued his ideologically driven, fact-denying, forty-seven percent ways, blaming his defeat on “free gifts” to Obama’s core constituencies, free birth control to single women in college, health care to African-Americans and Latinos, and a special gift to Latinos — the promise of amnesty to children of illegal aliens, “the so-called Dream Act kids.” In the conservative cocoon at Fox, Bill O’Reilly strongly agreed, but it is very interesting to observe many Republicans running away from the remark. Surely political calculation is involved, but it is also a healthy matter that key conservative figures, such as Bobby Jindal and Chris Christie, are distancing themselves from the ideological fiction of the society made up of takers and makers, as Paul Ryan has put it.

I wonder, thinking ahead to 2014 and 2016, perhaps there will be a Republican civil war, between the ideologues and the conservatives. I have my hopes, but also my concerns. But at least in this election, those who used facts to mobilize their campaign won over the prisoners of fictoids.

I identify with Barack Obama’s political position, as a centrist wanting to move the center left. I identify with the democratic left because of its long and developing progressive tradition, addressing the problems of inequalities based on class, race, religion, gender, nation and sexual orientation, and because of its critique of the injustices of untrammeled capitalism and its conviction that the present order of things can and should be subjected to critique, its conviction that the way things are is not necessarily the way they must be. For these and other substantive reasons, I am very happy with the election results.

But further and in a less partisan way, I understand that alternative political traditions, broadly understood as conservative, are worthy of respect, especially as they illuminate the importance of learning from experience and highlight the limits of reason. I respect this tradition and have learned from it. I think a healthy modern republic should be informed by it. And, for these reasons, I even have sought to find conservative intellectuals worthy of respect at Deliberately Considered, see here and here. It is a terrible loss that fact-denying, right-wing ideology has prevailed in the Republican Party in recent years, amplified by racist currents during the Obama presidency. But perhaps the tide will now change among conservatives.

Conservative thinker, Edmund Burke, and radical icon, Karl Marx, are important thinkers for me as I try to make sense of the political world, but it is the ambiguous and ambivalent commitments and insights of Alexis de Tocqueville and Hannah Arendt that make them my primary political teachers. Tocqueville, the ambivalent democrat, highlighted the dangers of mass society as the underside of democracy. (I should post my thoughts on this one of these days.) Arendt more crucially observed the dangers of ideology and emphasized that a common factual base is the ground upon which democracy is built. I sense that the most significant result of this election is that we are moving back to this ground. I hope Fox News craziness, the right-wing entertainment industry, as David Frum is now describing it, is “so yesterday,” or at least no more intimately connected to the Republicans than the Democrats are tied to MSNBC. I can’t tolerate either as a source of news. It worries me that some think of them as such.

This is how I understand my centrist orientation. My primary political commitment is to a free public life, where people with different identities and principles meet between left and right, i.e. in the center. I don’t’ believe in watered down progressive and conservative positions, but a position where there is informed debate. For me, this is the meaning of “the vital center.” I think this election, as truth prevailed over truthiness, and as a principled leader prevailed over one that pretended to be a true-believer, who had a very problematic relationship with factual truth, provides hope for a centrist with leftist commitments.

I knew when I left for Europe that in all likelihood President Obama would be re-elected, though I was anxious. The stakes were high. If he won, as expected, my return from my few weeks visit would feel like I was truly returning home. If he lost, I would feel like I was venturing to an alien country, one that I had hoped had been left behind, a country trying to revert to a state that didn’t include me, and many others, as full citizens.

A key of the Obama election, presidency and re-election has been inclusion, and the Republicans were pushing back, clearly revealed in their voter ID, voter suppression campaign. The changing demography helps to explain the President’s victory, but his great gift to the country has been to show the country how these changes are our greatest strength. The changing demography plus Obama’s vision go a long way in explaining the election results and the forthcoming changes in the United States.

He did it again in his victory speech as the nation’s storyteller-in-chief. It was a beautiful conclusion to a less than beautiful election. The ugliness of the opposition to Obama left a bad taste in our collective mouths for months, in fact, for years, thanks to the Tea Party, Fox, Rush and company. Obama in his victory speech reminded the American public and the rest of the world to keep our eyes on the prize. I watched on CNN in my hotel room in Warsaw. Today, I watched again with my friends at the Theodore Young Community Center. We decided to share the moment together. We were inspired.

“Our man,” as my dear friend Beverly McCoy speaks of the president, first got our attention, by marking the accomplishment of a free election and celebrating all who took part, linking fundamental political facts with the theme of his campaign, but including those who campaigned against him:

“Tonight, more than 200 years after a former colony won the right to determine its own destiny, the task of perfecting our union moves forward.  (Applause.)

I want to thank every American who participated in this election.  (Applause.)  Whether you voted for the very first time or waited in line for a very long time — (applause) — by the way, we have to fix that.  (Applause.)  Whether you pounded the pavement or picked up the phone — (applause) — whether you held an Obama sign or a Romney sign, you made your voice heard, and you made a difference.  (Applause.)”

He highlighted common goals of all Americans:

“(D)espite all our differences, most of us share certain hopes for America’s future.  We want our kids to grow up in a country where they have access to the best schools and the best teachers — (applause) — a country that lives up to its legacy as the global leader in technology and discovery and innovation, with all the good jobs and new businesses that follow.

We want our children to live in an America that isn’t burdened by debt; that isn’t weakened by inequality; that isn’t threatened by the destructive power of a warming planet.  (Applause.)”

He presented his specific policy priorities in his speech, as they are part of American aspiration: education, economic and technological development, the deficit and growing inequality, and climate change. The way he formulated these problems in this passage, I imagine, is difficult to oppose, though it is noteworthy that he was outlining a political center that he was attempting to move to the left.

I take this to be his specific political orientation, which explains why he spent so much of his time during his first term assuming the goodwill of Republicans when many of his supporters wished he would aggressively opposed them. And it also explains the nature of his great achievements including Obamacare, major advances in equal rights for gays, African Americans, women and immigrants, and significant assistance to the less advantaged as we have been enduring the Great Recession. He seeks a center framed by progressive principles.

And on election night, he emphasized citizenship and its obligations, linking his program with the aspirations and actions of his fellow Americans.

“The role of citizen in our democracy does not end with your vote.  America has never been about what can be done for us.  It’s about what can be done by us, together, through the hard and frustrating but necessary work of self-government.  (Applause.)  That’s the principle we were founded on.

I am hopeful tonight because I have seen this spirit at work in America.

What makes America exceptional are the bonds that hold together the most diverse nation on Earth — the belief that our destiny is shared; that this country only works when we accept certain obligations to one another, and to future generations; that the freedom which so many Americans have fought for and died for comes with responsibilities as well as rights, and among those are love and charity and duty and patriotism.  That’s what makes America great.  (Applause.)”

He went on to described the heroic acts of ordinary citizens: family business owners who took cuts in pay to avoid laying off their neighbors, workers cutting back in their hours so that their fellow workers wouldn’t be laid off, valiant soldiers who re-enlist and who killed Osama bin Laden, and political leaders acting beyond partisan concern to most effectively respond to Hurricane Sandy (an unsubtle shot out for Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey).

He presented his vision of the American Dream with inclusion emphasized:

“I believe we can keep the promise of our founding — the idea that if you’re willing to work hard, it doesn’t matter who you are, or where you come from, or what you look like, or where you love — it doesn’t matter whether you’re black or white, or Hispanic or Asian, or Native American, or young or old, or rich or poor, abled, disabled, gay or straight — you can make it here in America if you’re willing to try.  (Applause.)”

I think it is especially noteworthy that gay or straight and the disabled are on his list.

Obama’s presented in his victory speech, as he campaigned in this election, an expanding vision of equal citizenship with its rights and responsibilities for all. He governed utilizing this vision, and all his major speeches have included this vision from his address to the Democratic Convention in 2004, empowering his race speech, including his victory speech last week. It is part of an inspiring whole.

Demography + vision = the re-election of Barack Obama. It’s good to be home.

I am off to Europe today, leaving the excitement of the elections with ambivalence.  On the one hand, I won’t be completely up to date and in touch with the latest developments and won’t be able to work for the re-election of the President. On the other hand, to be honest, I haven’t been working on the campaign this year, apart from occasional small contributions and apart from my clearly pro-Obama commentaries. I also must admit that being away, I hope, cuts down on my anxieties about the election results. This election is driving me crazy.

I have been trying to figure out why I am so tied up in knots about it, why it seems to me that the election is so important and why I am so invested in the results. After all, there is a chance that moderate Mitt, and not severely conservative Romney, is the alternative.

Moderate Mitt, perhaps, wouldn’t be so bad. Perhaps, he is honestly revealing himself as he has been rushing to the center in recent days, with the identical foreign policy to Obama’s, guaranteeing that the rich will pay their fair share and promising to work with Democrats in forging a bi-partisan approach to economic growth and fiscal responsibility. Proud of his great accomplishment in effectively insuring universal health insurance to Massachusetts residents, perhaps, I shouldn’t even worry about his pledge to repeal Obamacare on day one.

Then again perhaps not: there is no way of knowing what Romney will do, who he really is, and that scares me. And even scarier, are the people who support him and will make demands upon him. From the crazies who denounce the President as a post-colonial subversive, bent on destroying America, to The Tea Party activists, to the neo-conservative geo-political thinkers, to supply side economists, who imagine that austerity is the path to growth (as in Great Britain?), to those who want a small non-intrusive government on all issues except those concerning sexual orientation and women’s bodies, to all those who just want to “take America back.” I am far from sure that moderate Mitt could resist their pressures, while I am quite sure that severely conservative Governor Romney wouldn’t, and would be, in fact, at the front of the barricades.

On every policy issue, in comparison to the Republicans, I support the President.  Yet, that isn’t the reason for my passion or my anxiety. Rather, I think, it has to do with feeling at home, feeling comfortable in my country. Something I am thinking about as I get ready to leave for a while.

Obama’s election opened our country up. It was something I was privileged to observe and celebrate with my friends at the Theodore Young Community Center, a rich, diverse community, primarily African American. I fear that Romney and especially the forces around him seek to close my country down. I share these fears with many of my friends. Especially with Beverly McCoy, the receptionist at the center, her passion for Obama is unmatched. She recognizes a competitor in my wife Naomi, and the three of us have become very close friends, along with other friends at Theodore Young. Beverly is sure that the passionate opposition and hatred of the President is ultimately because of race. I can’t disagree. I hope my leftist friends, those quick to be critical of Obama, remember this on election day, and also when they get carried away declaring that there is no difference between Romney and Obama.

I am off to see these friends now. I am off for a swim before my taxi to the airport and flight to Paris to visit family. Then on to Rome, Warsaw and Gdansk to give lectures and take part in discussions about the politics of small things and media, and the elections and my most recent book, Reinventing Political Culture, which has just been translated into Polish. It should be an interesting trip.

Yesterday, Beverly and I agreed that we would meet after the elections and celebrate our friendship no matter what. She wants to tell the world that our friendship is thanks to Obama, but it will live whether “our guy” wins or not. But I do hope that when I come home I will feel comfortable. To that end, Naomi and I cast our absentee ballots two weeks ago.

I felt like I was watching the Seinfeld Show. The debate reminded me of the famous episode, in which Jerry and George decide to pitch a situation comedy show to NBC, a show about nothing, about the interactive foibles of daily life, i.e. in the episode George and Jerry share with the audience the premise of the humor of the show they were watching (then America’s most popular).  “Debate about nothing” seemed to be the Romney performance strategy last night. Again, as in the first two debates, the Governor moved to the center, but this time he pretended to oppose Obama as he adopted all of Obama’s policies, for better and for worse: on Libya, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and drones. Romney pretended to bury Obama, as he in fact, praised his policies.

Romney expressed his opposition in his body language, in his characterization of Obama’s policies, in name calling, “apology tour” and all, as he supported substantively just about all the policies. Obama’s foreign policies can be and should be criticized by doves and hawks alike, by those who support torture as enhanced interrogation, including Romney until yesterday, and those, including me, who worry about the self-defeating sacrifice of human rights in the name of security, but Romney would have none of this. There is a pressing need for a serious foreign policy debate but Romney had a pitch planned and he professionally delivered it: a potential commander-in-chief, who is not too scary. I am impressed by his acting abilities, which did give reasons for some of his supporters and spinners to be pleased last night and leads me to despair about American democracy.

I can’t emphasize enough how strange Romney was, much stranger than George and Jerry. Of the three debates, last night’s was the most peculiar. As with the other two, it was viewed by the audience and by the performers mostly as a means to an end, deciding the election: less about competing policies and commitments, more getting votes. As with the other two debates, the performance of the candidates was more important than the substance of their positions. But what was striking to me in this debate was the raw cynicism of one of the debaters.

I have long been impressed by the dangers of cynicism in American politics. The first line of my book, The Cynical Society written in 1990: “I believe that the single most pressing challenge facing American democracy today is widespread public cynicism.” Last night, we observed a new high in cynical performance. Romney gave the audience what he thought it wanted to hear, unconstrained by principle, completely defined by interest.

We know from last night how the President conducts and will continue to conduct foreign policy. There was no hint from Romney what he would do. Cynicism is widespread in America, in the past and now, but it has limits. I believe that Romney went too far. Though he was “presidential” in his demeanor, the emptiness of his pitch made it unpersuasive. For this reason, I think, the polls suggest that the majority of viewers think he lost the debate, the overwhelming majority of independents and undecided voters think so, and as Nate Silver suggests, it may move the election just enough to significantly increase the chances of the President’s re-election. If the debate yielded a two percent movement in Obama direction, it would yield an increase from today’s seventy percent chance of an Obama victory, according to Silver’s model, to a eighty-five percent chance, one percent movement would yield an eighty percent chance and even a one half percent movement would yield a seventy-five percent chance. Obama’s debate victory last night does yield such movements, so: Obama wins!

There is a sense that the momentum since the debates has turned from Obama to Romney, while the structure of the Electoral College vote favors Obama. I think that it is now quite possible, given Obama’s command and steadiness, and the flashes of Romney as an empty suit, who will do and say anything to win, that the momentum will change.

Coming up, the last round: intensive campaign events mobilizing supporters. I think Obama can seal the deal if in his upcoming speeches and barnstorming he expresses his hopes and plans for his second term. This is the change in the campaign that I am looking for. It could have much more substance than last night’s debate. It could and should be about something.

Immediately after watching the second Obama – Romney debate, I, along with the majority of the viewers and commentators, concluded that Obama won. But as I collected my thoughts and wrote my initial response, I found that I had actually written a piece that was less about why Obama won, more about why Romney lost. I knew I had to write a follow up.

In the meanwhile, Roy Ben-Shai sent in a very different interpretation, which I thought was important to share. He thought that as the President won the battle of the moment, Barack Obama, the principled political leader who can make a difference, lost. While Romney didn’t win, the empty game of “politics as usual” did. I am not sure that I agree with his judgment, but I do see his point.

The quality of Obama’s rhetoric and argument is one of the four main reasons why I think that Obama has the potential to be a transformational president, which I analyzed fully in Reinventing Political Culture. Obama has actually battled against sound bite and cable news culture, and prevailed. But not last Thursday: Ben-Shai is right. Obama beat Romney not by playing the game of a strikingly different political leader, capable of making serious arguments in eloquent ways, establishing the fact that there is an alternative to the politics of slogans and empty rhetoric, but by beating Romney at his own game, dominating the stage, provoking with quick clipped attacks and defenses. The idealist in me is disappointed, but I must admit only a little.

Tough practical political struggle is necessary and not so evil. Democratic political persuasion can’t replicate the argument in a seminar room or a scientific journal. The rule of the people is not the rule of the professoriate and advanced graduate students, and it’s a good thing, keeping in mind the extreme foolishness of distinguished intellectuals cut off from the daily concerns of most people. Popular common sense helps avoid intellectual betrayals, untied to everyday concerns. The challenge is to somehow be tough in the day-to-day political struggle, including the world of televised debates, responding to immediate concerns, and still contribute to serious public deliberation about fundamental principles. I believe this happened in both debates, with Romney winning the first popularity contest and Obama the second, and in my judgment, Obama actually winning the implicit serious debate that is embedded within the political spectacle.

In both debates, two starkly different visions of America and two strikingly different programs for America were presented. In both debates, Romney was fundamentally dishonest, proposing a five-point program that has no substance, promising a great deal that is quite contradictory and unworkable: cutting taxes, increasing defense spending, balancing the budget, through closing unspecified loopholes and reducing deductions of the rich, and growing the economy (purportedly by cutting taxes on the job creators, i.e. the rich). It just doesn’t add up and makes little sense as a way to actually addressing the economic challenges. And as we will hear tonight, I suspect, he also promises to make America great again by “never apologizing,” demonizing China and pretending that the problems associated with the world historic civilizational transformation occurring in the Muslim and Arab worlds are all the fault of Barack Obama.

I should add, as I declare Obama wins the serious debate, I am also aware that Romney is now mounting a serious challenge. I am not as sure as I have been about my prognostications.

The commentators agree that Romney, despite the contradictions and thinness of his program, has the momentum, and the President has to tell people how the next four years are going to be different. I was struck by an exchange on The Chris Mathews Show on Sunday morning. The panel, Andrea Mitchel, Chris Mathews, Michael Duffy, Jonathan Martin and Kathleen Parker, a moderate to liberal bunch, agreed that there is a problem. Obama has to make a case for four more years. They wondered together “why has he not laid out what he is going to do?” They viewed it as “the central mystery of the last part of this campaign”: why hasn’t he laid out what he is going to do? Is entitlement reform? Is it military reform? Is it tax reform? Is it all three?” Or is it more industrial policy, auto industry? Why wait until after he is elected? Martin told the cynical purported truth: it wouldn’t be popular: cutting a deal to avoid the fiscal cliff, including cutting entitlements. The auto industry bailout is popular in some key states, but not in the rest of the country. They also agreed closure on Libya is pressing. This is the mindset of the mainstream pundits. It is also the campaign line of the Romney campaign: Obama has run out of steam.

Yet, I don’t understand this slogan and this analysis. Obama promises to stay true to his principles and implement them, moving “FORWARD” (his campaign slogan). A budget deal that includes tax increases and spending cuts. This makes sense and is popular, and it is projected to reduce the deficit by 3.8 trillion dollars in a decade. He will also work to sustain a robust recovery, by investing in infrastructure and pushing education reforms. From elementary schools to universities to green industry, he sees an active role of government as a key to economic recovery. In this regard, he will work to consolidate the advances of his first term, by implementing health care reform and regulations of the financial abuses that caused the financial crisis, i.e. the Affordable Health Care for America Act and Dodd-Frank. Obama is steady. He will follow through. And of all of Obama’s announced plans comprehensive immigration reform is a new initiative that is likely to be implemented. His victory would be thanks to the Latino vote and my guess is that enough Republicans will take notice to support significant reform.

While it is quite unclear who Romney is, whether he will be the servant of the Tea Party or the Massachusetts moderate, and how his proposals add up, Obama promises a steadfast political persona, a centrist moving the center to the left, a second term that enacts this position. This choice was apparent in the two debates. If the choice is clarified, Obama wins. More tomorrow, after tonight’s debate.

Many are saying that Obama “won,” that is, we won, the second presidential debate. I find this to be untrue, at least in the bigger picture, and unfortunately so.

Let us take a brief look at the recent events that led up to this debate. Prior to the debates, Romney was heavily down in the polls. The generally accepted view was that his only chance to overturn the scores would be some remarkable (almost magical) landslide at the presidential debates. But that, it was stressed, would be highly unlikely. After all, how much difference could a debate make? We already know the positions of the sides by heart; nothing substantively new or sufficiently remarkable could be stated so as to halt, let alone counter, Romney’s overwhelming flight downwards. Or is it? Romney showed up to the first debate like his life depended on it. True enough: the contents of the respective positions are known in advance and could not make much difference. But the performance could. Romney would be aggressive, precise, and most importantly, attack Obama directly (with the minimal courtesy and respect due, of course) at every occasion. He would show the American people who the true leader is, and what a terrible mistake they are making. Obama and his camp seem to have been caught off guard, overly confident, underestimating both Romney’s resilience and the potential importance of the debate.

Romney came to the first debate, so to speak, to the kill, and one of the main reasons for Obama’s “loss” was that he did not respond in kind. Romney was attacking, speaking directly to and about Obama, yet he did not heed to Romney’s rhythm. Obama stuck to his own tempo and demeanor, while on a few occasions being taken aback. This made him look “weak” and “tired,” even confused compared to Romney’s sharpness. This, it seems to me, simply confirms Obama’s most characteristic and compelling traits, and part of his particular nobility as a politician.

Ever since his first campaign, Obama made it a point to speak positively rather than negatively, to minimize the attacks on the other party (be it domestic or foreign) and maximize the talk of promise, change, improvement, and collective efforts; to minimize the language of fear and threat and maximize the talk of hope (let us put aside for now the fact that many of his promises he failed to live up to in practice –the promises and the promising at least were good).

By “winning” so decisively, what Romney proved in that first debate is what, by now, we all sadly know: aggression, especially in politics, wins the day. If you’re not aggressive, especially when the other side is, you are “wimpy” and a shadow, “disengaged.” This is allegedly true whether your opponent is a Republican or a terrorist, a Romney or an Ahmadinejad. In my opinion, this macho ideology may well be politically effective, but it is absolutely false and contradictory. To be able to focus on one’s own strengths and vision rather than on the other’s flaws and blindness, to speak the truth instead of calling out the other’s lies, to respond and resist non-violently to the other’s violence, the more so the more the other pushes (and the other will push, if only out of panic), is a show of power and resoluteness, not weakness. It was indeed a show of power and nobility that Obama (whatever flaws he might otherwise have) refrained, in the first debate, from mentioning or manipulating the poisonous and self-destructive remarks that Romney had been making, including the particularly sad one about the “47 percent.” The best way to counter this kind of divisive and patronizing approach is to ignore it, not to honor it with mention (especially given that it is common knowledge: Obama would be saying nothing new by bringing it up).

However, sure enough, Obama and his camp have “learned their lesson”. The first debate was the perfect reminder of what the “public” wants and to what it favorably responds. The situation in the second debate (as is often the case in sports) was reversed. Obama came up as the surprising underdog, and it was now the Romney camp that was caught off guard, overly confident, underestimating the underdog’s ability to talk that talk. This, in my opinion, is the lowdown of Tuesday night’s show: Having been pushed to the corner in the previous debate, Obama was forced to play their game, in their field. In that sense, the entire second debate was set within and framed by a Republican victory; it was a reactive move, and perhaps just as panicked and out of desperation as Romney’s had been in the first. Among other things, we could see Obama nearly mimicking the “enumerating” rhetoric used by Romney in the first debate to suggest that he is not talking “abstractly” (“We will do three things. Number one… Number two… Number three…,” all with the adjacent finger counting gesture).

Obama indeed managed to win it their way, in their field. It is, I admit, impressive. But his win is at the same time his loss and ours, certainly in the longer run. The “fierceness” of this debate — already celebrated by some as the “best” one ever– no doubt set a precedent for future debates, near and the far; a future that, from where I stand, seems rather bleak. The operation code is now to be direct and aggressive. The understanding is that, if played this way, debates have true transformative pull at the polls. To use the boxing metaphor that Obama is actually rather fond of using: Each opponent must keep his (or her) face and body shielded with the one hand, and, with the other, watch for the bare and vulnerable areas of the opponent’s. Each must take advantage of the opportunities unwittingly given by the other, and be sure to strike back whenever the other does. A lot of it has to do with timing: one must time one’s blows, and the expenditure of one’s energy and ammunition. The mentioning of the 47% remark, to cite one particularly good example, was brought up right on time, at the debate’s closing statement. Well played, Mr. President, we were eagerly waiting for this punch.

Who is steering at the wheel I am not at all sure, but for some time now our ship is steadily drifting to the right, and not only in the United States, in most of the electoral democracies. Divisiveness, intimidation, aggression, and warmongering may not help to win wars (nor, perhaps, are they meant to), but they certainly help winning elections. Obama’s notable victory Tuesday night, I am afraid, only served to remind us of, and perhaps to consolidate and accelerate, this overall direction.

The debate was again very stimulating, and again I had trouble sleeping, more out of excitement this time, not because I was fighting against despair, as was the case after the first Obama – Romney confrontation.

This debate turned the election back to its substantial fundamentals. Obama’s September advantage has evaporated. It was perhaps inflated by the Democrats excellent convention performance and the Republican’s very poor one, and also by Romney’s 47% put down. Now there is a real contest between a centrist who is trying to move the center to the left (think Obamacare), and a professional candidate with unknown political orientation, clearly against Obama, though not clear what he is for.

Three competing approaches to governance, in fact, have been presented in the campaign. If Romney had won last night, he would likely win the election. Then there would be a contest between Romney, the Massachusetts moderate, and Romney, the severe conservative. There’s no telling what the result would be. But because Obama prevailed, he is still in there, and for three reasons I think that he will likely prevail. It’s a matter of authenticity, common sense and American identity.

Moderate Romney won the first debate because he performed well and because the President didn’t. That was reversed last night. The President was sharp, answering questions accurately and with authority, responding to Romney’s attacks precisely, most evident in the way he turned his greatest vulnerability, his administration’s handling of the attacks on the diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya.

Romney tried to use the same technics to dominate and shape the discussion as he did the last time.  But it was off putting. He insisted on talking when moderator Candy Crowley tried to keep him within the time limit, first with success, then failing. His attempt to bully a woman didn’t look good, as was noted on social media. And then there was the unfortunate turn of phrase “binders full of women,” a phrase that took off on the web immediately, revealing as it does a patronizing approach to woman and a view from on high of human beings as pages that fit into binders.

Romney was not nearly as weak as Obama was in the first debate. But Romney’s second performance reveals the unattractive technics he used successfully in his first performance, perhaps lessening the earlier success.

In the first debate, Romney pivoted. His move to the center thrilled Republican moderates and operatives, apparently making him attractive to independents and undecided voters. It confused Obama, who responded poorly. But prepared for this now, Obama effectively responded and Romney now wasn’t able to cogently account for his proposals or for himself.

Romney was caught between his supply side fantasies of cutting taxes on the “job creators” to stimulate economic growth, and a promise that he wouldn’t favor the rich, when job creators = rich. He declared that his move to cut tax rates and radically increase military spending will be paid for by closing unspecified loopholes, but wouldn’t or couldn’t provide evidence. Obama was particularly sharp in criticizing this.

“Now, Governor Romney was a very successful investor. If somebody came to you, Governor, with a plan that said, here, I want to spend $7 or $8 trillion, and then we’re going to pay for it, but we can’t tell you until maybe after the election how we’re going to do it, you wouldn’t take such a sketchy deal and neither should you, the American people, because the math doesn’t add up.”

Romney used an authoritative tone to trump such contradictions in the first debate. It didn’t work last night. And there was a big difference between his weak performance and Obama’s. Obama’s identity, his character, like it or not, is consistent. Romney’s isn’t. After campaigning for President for six years, it is still not clear whether he is severely conservative Romney or moderate Mitt. Strong performance can hide this, but the weak performance raised serious doubts.

Romney tests common sense both in the specifics of his major policy ideas and in presentation of self. His strongest move in the debate was to use every bad statistic about the economy, sometimes questionably cooked, and claim it is the fault of Barack Obama, from employment statistics to the price of gasoline. Without recognizing the larger historical and global context of hard times, it is all Obama’s fault. Some of this seems pretty compelling. It is his best argument, but I have my doubts that it can work when the alternatives Romney proposes so obviously most directly benefit the most privileged and so closely resemble the policies of George W. Bush. The Governor’s inability to distinguish himself from Bush and his policies, I think, was a notable low point in Romney’s performance

Women played a special role in this debate. There was a stark contrast in the way that Romney spoke about and to woman and the way that the President spoke: women in binders versus “women as heads of households,” as the President answered the question of equal pay for equal work. What was remarkable about the women in binders gaffe, is that it revealed a candidate who seems to be removed from America as it is and as it is becoming: less white, Protestant, Anglo, heterosexual, socially equal and mobile, and educated, than Romney and the Republicans imagine, with more suffering that demands government action. Obama and the Democrats speak to the America that is becoming, while the Republicans are in denial.

I realize this may be the most politically momentous night of my life. The differences between Romney’s and Obama’s approaches to America and its problems are stark and the choice was clearly revealed. Obama won the contest, in my judgment and according to the early polls.  As a partisan, I am very pleased. As a sociologist of political culture, I am intrigued.

In my next post, I will further consider the debate and focus on the positive vision that Obama expressed. I heard many commentators last night declare that the President has still not presented his plans for a second term. I don’t think this is accurate and will explain.