Obama's election is not about "winning demographics"

Barack Obama is now the President-elect, and it's not about how he and the Democrats captured certain demographic groups, as the Detroit News editor Nolan Finley has said on WDET's Detroit Today show. It's truly about human values.

Conservatism is a bankrupt system that has benefitted the rich to an astounding degree, especially since Reagan won the presidency in 1980. Conservatism has sucked wealth from the middle class and poor by allowing the rich to set the tone for the way society should operate. Some call this the "corporate orientation"--a way of valuing corporate and business values at the expense of human values.

For too long, conservative policies, conservative politicians and their deregulation have been undermining the working class, middle class and even many whose incomes are over $100,000 per year.

As Naomi Klein has noted in her seminal book, The Shock Doctrine, the incomes of CEOs are now on average 411 times that of workers. This figure has ballooned from an average of 42 times the wages of workers in the 1970s.

This is a stunning figure, a sign of a virtual theft that has vacuumed wealth from the middle class to the rich.

Conservatives criticize Obama's talk of wealth redistribution. But where is the outrage about the redistribution of wealth to the rich that has happened, supposedly because of their hard work, since the '70s?

This redistribution has helped destroy our manufacturing base and eroded our economy to the point where so many are losing homes, have to work two jobs, and can't stay at home to watch our children when they get out of school each day because they have to work so hard. It's not just the rich getting richer that's a large part of it, as is Bush/Cheney's legacy of deregulation and lack of necessary regulation that led to the home mortgage and credit crisis.

It only makes sense: You can't have a viable economy without a large base of people with decent incomes to prop it up. People can't buy what manufacturers make without an income that fulfills their needs.

Well, electing Obama is one expression of the outrage about wealth flowing largely to the rich. And it's a pretty darn constructive way to start to remedy the decimation of our society that has resulted from dumb, self-centered and mean-spirited rule by conservative Republicans who are too rich or too dumb to comprehend how badly hurt working people have been by their policies.

It's not a "new age of liberalism," as Paul Krugman has asserted and Nolan Finley parroted. It is, instead, the tip of an iceberg that is pro-humanity. Obama, at first blush, seems to embrace people, not policies and parties.

Barack Obama reflects, to an astounding degree, the aspirations and needs of working people as well as wealthier Americans: compassion, unity, progress, uplifting the poor, and other values, including some that many reserve as strongholds of only those who call themselves "conservative."

Obama, above all, is a uniter, not a divider. He's a listener, the least self-focused of any politician I've seen. And he continues to uphold traditional "family" values that social conservatives applaud, such as support of family, freedom of worship, and a strong work ethic.

The road to the solutions to our problems is not as clear as the needs of American people and our economy. It's going to require consensus, hard work and a careful examination of what went wrong since 1980 and even before. Solutions will require bold plans to redress wrongs against people, and turn from the dangerous directions our policies have taken us.

Obama's path will be hard. He appears to have the intelligence, compassion and organizing skills to pull people from both conservative and liberal stances to work together and drag America out of the economic and human rights gutter it has fallen into at the hands of Bush, Cheney and others.

Keep at your Congressperson and Senator by email to resolve these and other social problems in the coming days. Click here to find out how to write your Senator.