Hannity and Limbaugh's World is Gone

When it comes to the election of Barack Obama not everybody seems to get it. While millions of people around the world celebrated the election of Mr. Obama on Tuesday, a few continue to seem totally lost as to what made this election so different and special. Obama should be appreciated more for the manner in which he ran his campaign than for the fact that he is the first black to be elected President in this nation that still leads the free world. This history making campaign in unique in that for nearly two years its focus was on the issues as opposed to the trivia and non consequential. It was June of ’08 before Mr. Obama and his campaign managers bent to the pressures of his party to even answer the negative attacks by his opponent and even then did the Obama campaign counter the onslaught of attack ads running against him. Through Bill Ayers, Rev. Wright, the Muslim connection and attacks on a supposedly un-American wife the Obama campaign kept talking about the economy, national defense, tax relief for the middle class and health care for the nation. The American voters were paying attention and listening. The decided early that this election was going to be about more than personal attacks and the minutia, that the future of life as we know it was far too important to allow the election of our leader to not be about substantive matters.

Those who fail to get it this time will probably never get it. I switched over last night, the night after election day just to see what Sean Hannity was saying one day removed from Obama’s big win. There in prime time, the day after what many consider to be a benchmark election in our nations history, was mega conservative T.V. star and talk show host Hannity with special guest ‘Joe the Plumber’. ‘Joe the Plumber’, unshaven, wearing what appeared to be a dirty T-shirt, was explaining how President-elect Obama was unpatriotic, un-American and totally unfit to be President. What Hannity and those like him fail to understand is that this nation for at least a fleeting moment has grown beyond the gimmicks and flash card sound bytes of the old Lee Atwater/Carl Rove politics. As an electorate we’ve seen our better angels and we know electing our officials can be done in a much better way. Hannity was pitiful in his obvious efforts to lead poor old Joe into saying whatever Hannity thought sounded good. Joe on the other hand looked and sounded like he was just coming off a day long drunk and would have followed any lead Hannity offered. Probably the best part was when Joe assured Hannity that he had done research on just what un-American and unpatriotic meant by looking them up in the Webster’s Dictionary earlier and was confident Obama met all the requirements.

Hopefully Sean it is not all about tricks and gimmicks any more. The Hannitys, the Limbaughs and the other leaders of the far right can now go peacefully back under the rocks from whence they came. The United States has experienced the light of legitimate campaigning and hopefully it will be far too painful to slide back into the dark and negative world of ‘Joe the Plumbers’.