Larry J. Sabato on THAT WAS THE YEAR THAT WAS: 2008 in Perspective
We have reached the end of another election cycle, but this has been no ordinary campaign.
The marathon of presidential politics was everyone’s focus, and the unforgettable cast of characters was long, from Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton on the Democratic side to John McCain and Sarah Palin on the Republican. These people were fascinating, but events were in the saddle.
* The economy melted down into the slag of near-depression. Wall Street’s “greed-is-good” manipulators became everyone’s favorite pinata, though we had an odd way of poking at them–shoveling $700 billion in taxpayer dollars their way, a bailout backed by top leaders in both parties.
* A deeply unpopular war cost over 4,100 American lives, wounded 30,000 more, and ran up bills that most experts believe will easily top $1.5 trillion before a projected troop withdrawal in 2010. The announced purpose was to capture Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that apparently did not exist. The unintended consequence of the war was to produce a Democratic presidential nominee unlike any other.
* An exceptionally disliked incumbent president became King Midas’s polar opposite: Everything he touched turned not to gold but to (bleep).
* Speaking of bleeping, a certain Democratic governor of Illinois reminded us at year’s end of Robert Penn Warren’s immortal words from All the King’s Men: “Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud.” Luckily for Rod Blagojevich, his passage into obscurity (probably via a jail cell) will be assisted by his difficult-to-pronounce surname.
In my own lifetime, there has been only one other year as packed with people and events that loomed as large….