2008-11-05 :: Kevin Murphy
Every time I’ve picked up a newspaper or turned on the news recently, my baby nephew has pointed, smiled and exclaimed: “Bamma!”
Bamma is one of the three things he likes. The other two are police cars and Bob the Builder.
Smart kid. He doesn’t know what Bamma is, or what his policies are, but my nephew can tell, instinctively, that Bamma is a good ‘un.
It seems that 46% of voting Americans couldn’t grasp that simple truth.
I’m not saying that my 20-month-old nephew, whose entire vocabulary is currently only about 100 words, almost all of them nouns, is smarter than 46% of Americans.
He is that, obviously. But I’m not saying that.
I’m saying that while the world is understandably relieved at Obama’s victory, and while I would like to offer my personal thanks to America for not fucking it up this time around, I’d hardly call this election result a sweeping endorsement of the country’s intellectual judgement.
That a small majority of the electorate chose the IQ ticket is definitely good news for the human race. But as I went to bed last night I did so thinking that anything less than an absolute, crushing, unequivocal rejection of McCain, Palin, the Republican party and the eight horrifying years of Bush, would not be enough to atone for 2004.
When I awoke to discover that a slouching biomass the size of something like the population of the UK was prepared to risk a Sarah Palin presidency, I felt a little vomit come up in the back of my throat.
Even McCain, in his concession address, seemed to be appalled and repulsed by his own petulant, braying redneck supporters.
His surprisingly overt reference to Obama’s race at first struck me as an oddly patronising headliner for his speech, before I realised that he was not addressing Obama, or even black people in general. He was addressing his audience, the blinkered, slobbering cretins who routinely humiliated him with their wilfully ignorant or racist outbursts during his campaign rallies.
It seemed to me that perhaps McCain, who genuinely seems like a nice bloke, was trying to make amends in some way, to distance himself from the Bibles-and-guns idiots that nowadays seem to comprise the entirety of the Republican “base”.
“Look, just don’t shoot the guy,” he appeared to be saying.
I wonder if they’ll listen.
And I wonder: how long before the Secret Service demand a pay raise?