SILVER LININGS, EVEN ON THE RIGHT
By Jeff Jacoby
The Boston Globe

Wednesday, November 5, 2008

excerpts

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, crushing his rival in the money war and therefore in advertising and field organization — 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 one-time party of fiscal sobriety and limited government turned into a gang of reckless spenders and government aggrandizers. If a few years in exile can lead Republicans back to their conservative, Reaganite roots, yesterday’s losses will not have been in vain.

But the most lustrous silver lining of all, even for disappointed Republicans, is the racial one. As a politician and policymaker, Obama distresses me; his extreme liberalism is decidedly not what the nation needs in its president. 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.

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