Post US Election Thoughts

American Politics is a fractured mess and the Republicans don't understand that this needs to change

I’ve been busy the last few weeks but no more blog neglect as I have some things to day and they need to be said (or my head might explode).

Lets start with the recently concluded US election. The last 4 years under President Obama in the US has seen a slow economic recovery from the 8 previous years of financial deterioration under Bush. At the same time, right from when President Obama began his campaign, the Republican Party has seemingly adopted a radical tone which, at times, has taken on racial overtones to try and show Obama as something he isn’t.

President Obama has had to endure relentless baseless attacks on him, on his birthplace, on his religion, on his values and, of course, on his choices. He has had to endure BLATANT racism from other elected officials having the audacity to bark orders at him and wave their fingers in his face to being yelled at while addressing Congress, being called a liar. All of this by people who, in any other nations, might be considered treasonous for the way they speak of and to their own political leader. I say that mostly because for the last 2 years, the Republican Party has done more to hurt their own nation then any terrorist organization ever could; They have ground the political mechanisms of the US to a screeching halt.

Through all the racism he has faced as President, he has remained calm, cool and collected

With President Obama’s resounding re-election victory (thank god!!!), which for whatever reason the idiots at Fox News never saw coming (and neither did Romney or Ryan), the hope is that the differences between the two parties can somehow be resolved and Washington can actually get back to working as a unit instead of having Republicans (led by their Tea Party members, the most blatantly racist of them all) doing everything they can to make the President look bad. As I say that, the Republicans are already continuing down the road they have been going along for 5 years now of polarizing the nation even further by conducting a witch hunt over the issues that led to the deaths of 4 Americans in Benghazi, Libya.

Mitt Romney came out 2 days ago and blamed his loss in the election on the same reasons Bill O’Reilly used that same night; Obama pandered to people who “wanted things from the Federal Government”. Basically, these rich white guys are whining that people who have nothing, want something. They are whining that poor people don’t want to have to pay for basic, fundamental health care. These people don’t want to have college loans force them into poverty because repaying them the way they used to be structured in the past, would bankrupt them. They want women to be equal to men in their pay. They want access to contraception and (in the worst of cases) abortion, a right enshrined in the 1970’s in the Roe vs. Wade Supreme Court case and yet still re-visited over and over again by the religious right-dominated Republicans.

“They”, the 47% which Romney pilloried in the now infamous secretly recorded campaign speech (plus the 4% of other people who also happened to vote for Obama), want gay people to be able to love and marry like the rest of the country, they want US troops to come home from war for the first time in 12 years. They want their elected officials to represent them and their moderate views instead of the extremist views that the Republicans seem to have embraced over the last 5 years. The Republican message is a narrow minded, predjudice view of the world that is as outdated as the message itself. Once that sinks in to the talking heads and head honchos of the party, only then will they mature into a political party that is representative of the will of the people and not the select few upper class, rich snobs who would rather “go it alone” then help out their fellow Americans.

 I really have a hard time seeing why anyone would vote for Romney, 

especially when he wouldn't even tell you the basic tenets of his fiscal plan

One of the most intriguing parts of their election was how some of the words used by both Mitt Romney and President Obama about Americans really do ring more true of Canadians then it does of Americans. America is not the “great social experiment” that they claim it to be. That is in fact Canada. When you go to the US, you are indoctrinated into a mindset of becoming “American”. Maybe this has lessened now then before but as recently as 10 years ago, many immigrants identified first as being American, and then where they were from. I was born and raised in Toronto and the first thing I say when people ask me is that I am Portuguese because that’s always been the way we describe ourselves in many parts of this country. Sure we are Canadian, but we identify first with the country of birth of our parents (even more so when both our parents are from the same place and are the same ethnicity, but that’s another subject altogether).

Canada is the mosaic model that US political pundits speak of when they (now, suddenly) use that word, not America. Just look at how the voting panned out for the electoral college votes. All of the major metropolitan areas of the US voted for Obama (New York, California, Florida, Illinois, Michigan, Massachusetts, and Ohio), while all of the states that voted for Romney were part of the former Confederate States during the Civil War (the ones that had the hardest time with the idea that slavery was a “bad” thing) voted in favour of Mitt Romney (mainly Texas, Alabama, Louisiana, the Carolina’s, Wyoming, Arkansas, Georgia and Kentucky).

 This map didn't have the added 29 Electoral College seats that Obama won from Florida

nevertheless, it was a total asswhopping, something Fox News was completely shocked to see 

As much as we differ in Canada about certain issues, Universal health care is something we all agree is needed simply based upon how poorly we see the US health care system in the US runs. It’s all about money over people in the US when it comes to health care, not in Canada. We have a strong central Government (that some do not like) which keeps our fiscal house in order while still maintaining the kinds of social programs that Americans can only dream of having (as much as Fox news has continually tried to denigrate us about throughout their hotly contested and testy election).

Despite the push back from the Right in America against the concepts of community and being compassionate towards their most destitute, the political push for policies that actually help out EVERYONE instead of just the top 1% have gained traction and are now on the verge of being engrained as the lasting legacy of President Obama’s presidency.  The changing demographics of America are certainly a huge factor but they are still miles away from being the kind of fully integrated and accepting society that we are in comparison to them.

We are the cultural mosaic that they are now trying to convince themselves that they in fact are. It is almost laughable to hear Americans who say that about themselves. It is almost as if they fail to see just how far away they actually are from being a true “mosaic” of nationalities and ethnicities. When an entire political party can get away with institutionalized racism against the President of the nation for nearly 5 years, then clearly America, you are nowhere near what we have in Canada. It is true that in the major cities, the melting pot is starting to show some cracks. People in New York and LA and Chicago are beginning to identify differently than they used to in the past, mostly due to where they emigrating from. This self-identification sea change may well be the result of seeing how we as Canadians identify ourselves. Is it possible that we are having an effect on them?

Maybe for all the things we worry about how our culture has been negatively influenced (for example, US TV) as well as other traits that we have been absorbing from American culture, maybe one thing has transferred back down south from us; the need to have some <GASP!!!> socialist-types of ideas about helping out everyone, no one being left behind (sounds like that old Bush phrase about no student being left behind doesn’t it), and protecting the poor by giving them free health care. America, it appears, is trying to become a little Canadian suddenly and its not a bad thing despite what Racist Republicans would have their constituents believe.