The Sunshine Empire

I can time it to when it happened. Saturday evening after the Florida-Vanderbilt game.

I’ve hit the political doldrums.

I don’t know what to do.

Even our operative Just-Will said to me today that things are slow without the election. The Onion has done stories about the empty lives of Obama campaign volunteers without change to affect. Yet does the world offer hope and entertainment for sufferers of ADD like myself? Much like federal elections, every two or four years a James Bond movie comes out and the new Bond flick will be premiering at the end of the week. College football in the south is always a pageant of dramatic violence, but my Florida Gators are in the thick of an SEC and BCS title race.

Yet even my doldrums without the high drama of the longest, greatest, and most expensive election in the history of politics can by soothed by the suspense of the selection of the cabinet and change of course that Barack Obama will undertake. But as much as I think most gripes about liberal media bias are nothing more than a crutch for those who lack winnable ideas, the national media is getting a little over indulgent with the 44 love. MSNBC has changed their tag line to, “The Power Of Change.” That is almost like Fox News in February of 2001 premiering with the slogan, “We’re Compassionate, You Decide Conservatively.”

Yet as much as I understand some of the media’s being taken away with President-elect Obama historic election, the idea of how much of a shift in American politics is another interesting notion of debate. Our chief political adviser, fresh from being named one of the best lawyers in America for 2009 (You don’t want to meet, our lawyer) has said that he disagrees with the idea that this election means the country has moved drastically to the left. I do agree to an extent, but those that are begging anyone to agree with them that the country is still center right are wrong as well. The country is just center. One of the wisest men that I knew during my high school years was Pete Romaine. The Vietnam vet would always talk about the great overlapping ven diagram of American political thought. Sean Hannity and Ralph Nader live on the fringe, America lives in the overlapping center.

The President-elect said in his speech to the 2004 DNC that we are not red states and blue states but the United States of America. I would say that after this election, we are not 1964 America, and not 1980 America, but 2008 America.