On right, reasons for some solace
TO BE a conservative in Massachusetts is to know disappointment, never more so than on Election Day, when candidates and causes of the right rarely stand a chance. Waiting in line at my Brookline polling place yesterday, I was under no illusion that my vote would change the outcome: Barney Frank would be reelected to the US House, John Kerry would go back to the Senate, and Massachusetts would vote decisively for Barack Obama.
But even for a red voter in the bluest of states, Election 2008 has its consolations:
The Clintons really won't be going back to the White House.
We haven't seen the last of Sarah Palin, who demonstrated star power as she withstood with aplomb and good humor a vicious assault from the left.
Government financing of political campaigns, always a dreadful idea, is dead. Yes, Obama egregiously broke his solemn promise to accept public financing and its attendant spending limits. But having witnessed Obama's astonishing financial blowout - he raised well over $600 million - no future candidate will agree to be shackled by those limits.
A turn in the wilderness will do Republicans good. During the GOP's years in power, the onetime party of fiscal sobriety and limited government turned into a gang of reckless spenders and government aggrandizers. Perhaps a few years in exile will lead Republicans back to their conservative, Reaganite roots.
But the most lustrous silver lining of all is the racial one. As a politician and policymaker, Obama distresses me; his extreme liberalism is not what the nation needs. But as a symbol - a son of Africa elected to lead a majority-white nation that once enslaved Africans and treated their descendants with great cruelty - Obama's rise makes me proud of my country. The anthem of the Civil Rights Movement was "We Shall Overcome." Impossible as it might have seemed scant decades ago, we have.
Jacoby's e-mail is jacoby@globe.com. 