And to all those watching tonight from beyond our shores, from parliaments and palaces to those who are huddled around radios in the forgotten corners of our world – our stories are singular, but our destiny is shared, and a new dawn of American leadership is at hand.
To those who would tear this world down – we will defeat you. To those who seek peace and security – we support you.
And to all those who have wondered if America’s beacon still burns as bright – tonight we proved once more that the true strength of our nation comes not from the might of our arms or the scale of our wealth, but from the enduring power of our ideals: democracy, liberty, opportunity, and unyielding hope.
For that is the true genius of America – that America can change. Our union can be perfected. And what we have already achieved gives us hope for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.
Update: I can’t find embeddable video of today’s victory speech, but here’s the BBC version. Contrast though with Obama’s speech after he stormed to victory in the Iowa caucuses back in January:
You see how immediately how Obama has withdrawn into himself, become more dignified, more Presidential – after Iowa he was looser, happier, free of that foreboding he must feel now that the USA (and the mess it’s in) is his responsibility.
It reminds me of the famous picture of Cherie hugging Blair as they arrived in Downing Street the morning after Labour’s 1997 victory – where she has that poignant ‘oh shit – what have we done?’ look on her face:
Update II: Sad to see McCain having to quiet the boos (for Obama) as he conceded the race, though the crowd did get more gracious as the speech went on. As I have argued, this is probably one of those elections where the loser is driven into a temporary period of insanity by its defeat.
Rather ominous, then, that the only full-throated cheer of the night was for (a slightly tearful) Sarah Palin, who McCain described as: “one of the most impressive campaigners I have ever seen and an impressive new voice in our party for reform, and for the principles that have always been our greatest strength.”
Thought the body language between the two was pretty chilly, though. And remember this vicious quote from a few days ago, from an unnamed McCain adviser:
She is a diva. She takes no advice from anyone. She does not have any relationships of trust with any of us, her family or anyone else.
Also, she is playing for her own future and sees herself as the next leader of the party. Remember: Divas trust only unto themselves, as they see themselves as the beginning and end of all wisdom.
Update III: Have to say, I’m feeling pretty happy about my prediction of a 5% victory in the popular vote, which I made not long after Iowa and have stuck to steadfastly ever since. Have also been irritating people by saying that Obama is already a two-term President – time will tell on that one.
Update V: Surprising factoid of the night – via Kos:
Something to look at in the next couple of days — turnout sucked. Not all ballots are in, but we’re currently at almost 119M for the night. We had 122M vote in 2004. So we may get to 2004 levels. A quick spot check confirmed numbers down in many states (e.g. CA, NY, OH, etc). Could it be Republicans staying home? A look at the exit polls will be on my agenda tomorrow.
More than 130 million people turned out to vote Tuesday, the most ever to vote in a presidential election.
With ballots still being counted in some precincts into Wednesday morning, an estimated 64 percent of the electorate turned out, making 2008 the highest percentage turnout in generations.
In 2004, 122.3 million voted in what was then the highest recorded turnout in the contest between President George W. Bush and Sen. John Kerry.
Previously red states targeted by the Barack Obama campaign demonstrated remarkable turnout, setting records in North Carolina and elsewhere. Increased turnout was also reported in states including Virginia and Indiana.
Update VI – Here’s an eye watering statistic. The election cost $4.2bn ($5.3bn if you include the congressional and senate races). 120-130m Americans voted. So that’s nearly $35 spent for every vote cast.
Update VII – From the department of sore losers, the batshit crazy Debbie Schlussel:
With Black Panthers ruling the polling places and idiocy ruling the minds, America is now unstable. This election will instantly change our lives . . . for the worse. And dummies and the mob mentality are dominating voting booths across America. Our country is now unstable like those of Europe. The numbers of Muslim aliens and U.S.-born Muslims will eventually mirror those of Europe. We’re just a decade or so behind.
Congrats, America. We’re the new Europe.
(No deodorant, lack of showers, and women without shaved pits and legs can’t be far behind . . . along with the Islamic wildings and mobs. I can already smell it. And it’s malodorous.)
Just watched Wonder Boy’s speech. Hmph. “Callused hands?” When did he ever have callused hands?
All right, I’m sour. The most liberal member of the U.S. Senate! And that shakedown-artist of a wife, with the permanent frown! And Joe Biden! …
I’m sour about the GOP too. What did it all get us, those 8 years of pandering and spending? If GWB had turned his face against new entitlements, closed the borders, deported the illegals, held the line on calls to loosen mortgage-lending standards, starved the Department of Education, and declined those invitations to mosque functions, would the GOP be in any worse shape now?
What won this election was the packaging skills of David Axelrod, the swooning complicity of the media, the ruthless opportunism of Barack Obama, and the unprincipled thuggishness of his supporters.
Before McCain took the stage, Nathaniel Eyler, 29, of Phoenix, mouthed the words as the song “God Bless the USA” played.
“Scared,” he said in response to how he felt about the outcome, calling Obama a “socialist.”
“I’m not going to sugarcoat it. I’m scared. Just the idea of Barack Obama as president of the United States scares me. It does not embody the idealism I grew up with and am passionate about. We’re Americans. We’re resilient. We’ll bounce back. Our government’s idiot-proof. There’s nothing he can do that we can’t fix in the end.”
Still, he said, “We’re going to be taking steps backwards.”
William S Lind suggests that beyond Afghanistan, the Fourth Generation future belongs neither to al Qaeda nor to the Taliban but to two more sophisticated models, Hezbollah and the Latin American drug gangs (I would add other criminal networks and piracy too). He writes:
Both can fight, but fighting is not primarily what they are about. Rather, both are about benefiting their members with money, services, community, identity, and, strange as it may sound, what passes locally for good government. Even the drug gangs’ governance is often less corrupt than that of the local state. Both of these 4GW models can fall into the fatal error of alienating the local population, but the tendency is not inherent. While Hezbollah is religiously defined, it seems to appeal well beyond the Puritans, which means it can give orders Puritans will not obey. The drug gangs’ principal faith is in making money, and few faiths are more broadly latitudinarian. In Iraq as elsewhere, the fading of the al Qaeda model is being balanced not by the rise of a new state but by the adoption of other models of 4GW. So far, as best I can determine, no foreign intervention in a Fourth Generation conflict has succeeded is re-creating a real state (you can add Ethiopia in Somalia to the long list of failures).
With that in mind it is depressing to read that the newly appointed commander of Nato’s anti-piracy patrol off the coast of Somalia says it will be difficult to defend ships from pirate attacks. This at a time when Nato is sending seven frigates to support US navy vessels already there, and India and several European countries have said they will also mount anti-piracy patrols.
“The time that a pirate unveils himself to the time that he’s onboard ship is such a short period of time,” says Admiral Mark Fitzgerald
Cynics might suggest that this is a careful piece of expectations management (think about the failure of SOCA as another example of how a Government over promises/ but under delivers), but it’s no wonder that NSAs (non state actors) are able to leverage considerable influence in proportion to their size and capabilities when the bureaucracies are not necessarily constrained by current laws/rules but by process of implementing them. The rules of engagement are still being debated by Nato – and if I were a betting man I would suggest that such rules are unlikely to be in place before the NATO task force has to respond to its first attack.
In his interview with the BBC Admiral Mark Fitzgerald also raises a rather more worrying issue*. Given how busy the sea lanes are, he asks: How do you prove a guy’s a pirate before he actually attacks a ship?
If you haven’t read it already, World Bank President Bob Zoellick’s speech on multilateral reform earlier this month is definitely worth a read. One of best nuggets in it is his call for “a Facebook for multilateral economic diplomacy” – the rationale for which goes like this:
The G-7 is not working. We need a better group for a different time. The G-20, though valuable, is too unwieldy in moving from discussion to action. We need a core group of Finance Ministers who will assume responsibility for anticipating issues, sharing information and insights, exploring mutual interests, mobilizing efforts to solve problems, and at least managing differences.
For financial and economic cooperation, we should consider a new Steering Group including Brazil, China, India, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, and the current G-7. Such a Steering Group would bring together over 70 percent of the world’s GDP, 56 percent of world population, 62 percent of its energy production, the major carbon emitters, the principal development donors, large regional actors, and the primary players in global capital, commodity, and exchange rate markets.
But this Steering Group would not be a G-14. We will not create a new world simply by remaking the old. It should be numberless, flexible, and over time, it could evolve. Others may be added, especially if their rising influence is matched by a willingness to help shoulder responsibilities.
This new Steering Group should meet and videoconference regularly to foster group responsibility. The Deputies should have frequent and informal discussions. An active network of bilateral consultations within and beyond the group will support it. We need a Facebook for multilateral economic diplomacy.
It’s a timely reminder that there’s no hard and fast rule to say that multilateral cooperation has to revolve around formal multilateral organisations – and especially refreshing to hear this coming from the head of the World Bank. (And yes, he does have a Facebook page, since you wonder.)
Responses to the financial crisis over the last few weeks seem to bear out Zoellick’s point. Although multilateral cooperation has been central, multilateral organisations haven’t been: the IMF, for example, has been largely absent from the main action, and while the EU managed in the end to be at the forefront of marshalling a collective response, it was the Council of Ministers – not the Commission – that pulled it all together.
In this light, it’s perhaps ironic that while Gordon Brown has come to be seen as one of the main organisers of this non-organisationally-based but nevertheless fundamentally multilateral crisis response, his stated vision for multilateral reform is very organisationally focussed, what with emphasis on a new Bretton Woods, an enhanced early warning role for the IMF and so on.
In the summer, I gave a talk at the United Nations University G8 symposium on climate change, where I explored the threshold between conflict and cooperation on carbon control.
Belatedly, the talk is online – either as a pdf, or you can read the full text after the jump.
Imagine you’re advising China or India – or perhaps a poorer developing country such as Ghana – on their preparations for the climate change negotiations in Copenhagen. What sort of deal should these countries be prepared to accept? What would seem fair?
Nick Stern sidles up to these questions in his paper – Key Elements of a Global Deal on Climate Change. His starting point is that global emissions need to drop to around 20 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalents (and then further to around 10GT CO2e in the decades that follow) – that’s around 2 tonnes of CO2e in 2050 for each of the world’s 9 billion people or so.
Stern believes that there is no choice but for countries to converge on this per capita average:
This target for per capita emissions by mid-century is so low that there is little scope for any major country to depart significantly above or below it. If one or two large countries were to manage only to reduce emissions to, say, 3T or 4T per capita, then it would be difficult to see which other major grouping of countries would be able to get emissions close to zero: and the global target would be unlikely to be reached.
So…let’s imagine the Americans have accepted this logic (suspend belief for a moment) and have a proposal for reducing their emissions from over 20T today to Stern’s 2T by 2050. They enter the negotiating room expecting other countries to do the same.
How would you advise China, India or Ghana to respond? They start from a very different point – around 5T per Chinese citizen, 2T for an Indian, and maybe around 1/2 tonne for a Ghanaian.
Now, as Stern admits, for them, simple convergence would be a pretty rough deal.
All major groups getting to 2T/capita is a pragmatic approach and not a strongly equitable one. It takes little account of the greater per capita contributions of the developed countries to the historical and future contributions to the stock of GHG emissions.
My instinct would be to urge the Chinese, Indians and Ghanaian to forgo what might be a fun, but ultimately unproductive, squabble about historical emissions. Be magnanimous about the past, I’d suggest. Instead focus on what really matters – who’s going to be allowed to emit what over the next forty years.
Because however far Chinese, Indian or Ghanaian emissions are allowed to increase before they start to drop towards 2T – its absolutely certain that their total emissions between now and 2050 (on a per capita basis) will be significantly lower than America’s.
In other words, there’s no trajectory that can be drawn that gives these countries a fair share of the next generation emissions ‘cake’.
