From TPM Reader SR …
I’ve had an odd sense of disorientation, lately, like the waves hitting the boat are coming from so many directions that I can’t get my sea legs under me.
Partly, its a sense of anti-climax. As Frank Rich noted back in July, Obama has basically been acting-president for months now. He has had the policy initiative and has been the public face of America since the Kuwait/Europe trip. So now, it feels a lot like I’m invited to a big over-the-top formal wedding for a couple who have been living together for years. Another disorienting wave is the sense that so many of us fought to get this guy elected because we had a shared vision that he could get the wheels back onto the tracks, but now, instead, he is going to have to clean up a gawdawful train wreck. It took too just a little too long. As I’ve watched the weight of the responsibility for management of that disaster palpably bear down on him, I’ve actually felt sorry for my part in doing it to him. And then I thank God its not McCain.
Still, driving home last night, I was laughing again at the way some BBC reporters on “The World” trill the r’s and seemingly put an apostrophe after the “O” so that his name comes out “Barrrrrik O’Bama.” It’s almost like his election is so disorienting to them that they subconsciously transpose him into a more comprehensible frame: an Irishman. at once exotic and foreign, yet entirely familiar to an Englishman or a Scot. Then, suddenly, for what seemed like the thousandth time, I was whipsawed by that topsy-turvy feeling of unreality that hits when you realize that next Tuesday afternoon, a black man with a distinctly un-European name will be President of the United States, and the country’s basically okay with that. It choked me up again, so I guess there’s a still a good chance I’ll get a little weepy on Tuesday, after all.
