Progressive Opinion

nextnewdeal.net — How do Americans really feel about taxes? Anti-tax groups and limited-government activists are quick to invoke a long American tradition of tax revolt and resistance in making the case that aversion to taxes is as American as apple pie. But this simple narrative gets the story wrong. The most recent such indication came on Election Day, when voters rejected tax limitation measures and supermajority requirements in Florida and Michigan and Californians strongly endorsed increases in the sales tax and income taxes for high earners in order to fund public education. Though notable in a political environment dominated by anti-tax rhetoric, such support is actually not as exceptional as it seems. It’s worth remembering, now that the election is over and we turn to the looming fiscal problems that confront state and federal governments, that Americans also have a long history of embracing and defending higher taxes.

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truthdig.com — What Barack Obama tried to tell America in the hour of his remarkable victory is that the nation’s future won on Election Day. Seeking to inspire and to heal, the reelected president offered an open hand to partisan opponents in the style that has always defined him. “Tonight,” he said, “despite all the hardship we’ve been through, despite all the frustrations of Washington, I’ve never been more hopeful about our future.” In the days ahead, there will be time to absorb the magnitude of this moment—achieved under the cloud of persistent unemployment and a multibillion-dollar campaign of calumny—but the president clearly knows that he returns to the White House with a renewed mandate. Against great odds, he won nearly all the same states that elected him in 2008 and won the popular vote despite an enormous, angry backlash in the old Confederacy.

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huffingtonpost.com — Tuesday's election was important for many reasons. Its outcome will certainly benefit millions and millions of people -- both in the United States and around the world. And President Obama's campaign will be remembered as one of the best-run political efforts in the history of American politics. But beyond the many important short and mid-term consequences, I believe it will likely be remembered as an inflection point in American political history. Here are six reasons why.

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huffingtonpost.com — I have to admit, I did not write a concession column, just in case I needed it. Seriously, a man running for the most powerful office in the country didn't bother to plan for one of the two contingencies that were guaranteed to happen last night? And he wanted us to let him make crucial decisions for all of us? Willard Mitt Romney's shocking lack of preparedness last night, when it came to speech time, was truly the icing on the sweet, sweet cake of Barack Hussein Obama's second victorious election, at least for me.

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Then I looked around at the rest of the election, and saw that America hadn't just re-elected a black man to the White House, but the entire country lurched leftwards last night in a significant fashion. Which is what my title refers to (conceived in homage to the greatest subtitle on a book, ever.

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truthdig.com — The election is over, and President Barack Obama will continue as the 44th president of the United States. There will be much attention paid by the pundit class to the mechanics of the campaigns, to the techniques of microtargeting potential voters, the effectiveness of get-out-the-vote efforts. The media analysts will fill the hours on the cable news networks, proffering post-election chestnuts about the accuracy of polls, or about either candidate’s success with one demographic or another. Missed by the mainstream media, but churning at the heart of our democracy, are social movements, movements without which President Obama would not have been re-elected.

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nytimes.com — MUCH of the coverage of Tuesday’s results has focused on the strength of Barack Obama’s coalition — minorities, women and young voters. But that analysis misses the real point. The contours of the 2012 presidential race were shaped less by the country’s changing demographics than by the underlying attitudes and values of American voters, who are always far more complex than they appear to pollsters. The president’s victory was a triumph of vision, not of demographics. He won because he articulated a set of values that define an America that the majority of us wish to live in: A nation that makes the investments we need to strengthen and grow the middle class. A nation with a fair tax system, and affordable and excellent education for all its citizens. A nation that believes that we’re most prosperous when we recognize that we are all in it together.

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truthdig.com — Abroad, the widely noted aspect of Barack Obama’s reelection victory was its social and class character. The president was reelected by a majority of American minorities. He won 93 percent of the African-American vote, which is hardly surprising, but also 71 percent of the Hispanic electorate, while his part of the white active electorate diminished about 10 percent from the share he carried four years ago. This is an inevitable result of the steady ethnic diversification of the American population and the increasing incidence of inter-ethnic or interracial marriage, with a consequent diminishing of the originally dominant Caucasian component in the make-up of the population of the United States, and of the historical culture that the founders possessed.

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thenation.com — We are glad the 1 percent were rebuffed at the polls. We are glad the racist minority that still poisons this country’s politics failed to get their way. We are glad that progressive politics—small-dollar donors, early voting, an expanded and diverse electorate—made the difference. We are ready to help—or to push—President Obama to have a successful second term.  Whatever intransigence he meets in Congress, there’s much that President Obama can do with his executive power—on immigration, as we’ve seen, on ratcheting down the drug war, and even on carbon emissions and climate.  But we don’t need tweaks; we need deep structural change.   It’s up to the organized people who defeated organized money at the polls in this election to make that happen.

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prospect.org — The presidential election was a choice between two different governing philosophies. For all the petty disputes and endless coverage of gaffes, both candidates spent time making a case for their fundamental visions of government—what it should and shouldn't do, where its obligations are, how it relates to the citizenry, and what we have a right to expect from it. Obama talked repeatedly about how we're all in this together, the essence of progressive belief. And he won that argument. As the difference between 2008 and 2010 taught us, these victories can be short-lived. But for now, everyone should understand that the left made progress that went well beyond the White House.

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krugman.blogs.nytimes.com — For a long time, right-wingers — and some pundits — have peddled the notion that the “real America”, all that really counted, was the land of non-urban white people, to which both parties must abase themselves. Meanwhile, the actual electorate was getting racially and ethnically diverse, and increasingly tolerant too. The 2008 Obama coalition wasn’t a fluke; it was the country we are becoming. And sure enough that more diverse and, if you ask me, better nation just won big. Notice too that to the extent that social issues played in this election, they played in favor of Democrats. Gods, guns, and gays didn’t swing voters into supporting corporate interests; instead, human dignity for women swung votes the other way. A huge night for truth, justice, and the real American way

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