When Barack Obama was running for a U.S. Senate seat in 2003, he attended a cocktail party at which a prominent author mistook him for a waiter and asked him to fetch a drink.

Oof.

Will.i.am has a new video:

From The Onion:

Yeah, no more politics for a little while…

“The last two years proved who ‘the real John McCain’ is.”

Looking back, now that the election is over, I have to say that I don’t buy this.  People do stupid, scummy, out-of-character stuff when they’re running for office – especially when they’re running for President.  They do things they wouldn’t normally do, and justify it by noting that what really matters are the things they do once they take office – not things they do when they’re trying to get elected to that office.

I think we were really lucky that Barack Obama was strong enough not to resort to embarrassing compromises too often (regardless of what the media now claims). It wasn’t always this for Democrats.

Bill Clinton is probably not proud of his 1992 trip back to Arkansas to execute a mentally disabled man. During the 2000 Presidential campaign, did Al Gore really talk about the issues that he thought were most important?  That you thought were most important?

Were John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, and John Edwards thinking more about weapons of mass destruction or their own political ambitions when they cast their votes on the Iraq War?

Even Barack Obama voted to reform FISA on Bush’s terms, granting telecoms retroactive immunity for warrantless wiretapping – and he used to teach Constitutional Law!

Do these capitulations and moral compromises make our politicians unprincipled frauds?  To some extent, yeah, they sure do.  Should they outweigh all the good that these men and women have fought for and achieved over the course of the rest of their careers?  I think we’d all say that they should not.

Mostly, these failures of nerve, of temporarily putting ambition before principle, are sins we forget when our candidate loses, and forgive if we’re lucky enough to have that candidate turn out to be a capable public servant.

Over the last two years, McCain really did vote with Bush 90% of the time.  He did.  The country was looking for as broad a coalition against Bush as we could get, and he wouldn’t be a part of it.  He apparently thought that that was what he needed to do to win the Republican primaries, and he was probably right.  There’s no doubt that many of the votes he cast and many of the statements he made (especially his flip-flop with regard to the treatment of foreign detainees) were inexcusable, and will stain his reputation for a very long time.

Here’s the thing, though:  Democrats controlled Congress for those two years.  Over that period, many of the Arizona Senator’s votes led to very little action.  Quite a few of them were effective only in convincing Republican primary voters that McCain was not actually a closet Democrat.  Let’s not forget: in 2002, John McCain was allegedly considering a move out of the Republican Party, and, in 2004, he was allegedly on the short list to be John Kerry’s running mate.

How could that have been?  Why would Senator Kerry have even considered running with McCain? Well, from 2000 – 2006, McCain became Bush’s most capable foil in the Senate.  Not just among Republican Senators, but among all Senators.  Deservedly or not, he was the Senator who was most respected by the national press, and when he broke with the President, it changed how a significant number of people saw an issue, because it changed how the national media reported on that issue. He sided with Democrats – against Bush - on environmental regulation, health care reform, gun control, and the first wave of Bush’s tax cuts.  This is not ancient history.

You may also recall that in 2002 McCain co-wrote a law that (with Sen. Russ Feingold) that attempted to eliminate unlimited “soft” money in politics, and required the “I approved this message” addition to campaign-funded ads.  The point of all that was to improve the quality of political campaigns, and to reduce the appearance of corruption in government – two things that were not exactly at the top of our current President’s to-do list.  He pursued campaign finance reform for years, at considerable risk to his standing within his own party.  If it hadn’t been for the Enron scandal, Republicans would have never let the bill make it to the President’s desk, and even if they had, Bush would have certainly vetoed it.

I think that McCain’s body of work in the Senate, taken as a whole, including those moments of political courage, including those moments of stubbornly standing on principle, and, yes, including his recent drive to get his party to forget those moments, is the more accurate measure of McCain the man.  It’s indisputable that, in order to take a shot at becoming President, he disappointed many of his liberal and independent admirers by transforming into someone who was unrecognizable to them. It’s very tempting, especially now, to evaluate him in light of his 2007-08 Presidential campaign alone - but it’s not the whole picture.

I’m glad McCain 2.0 didn’t sell, and I’m glad that the right wing which he thought he need so badly has been marginalized.  Like the rest of the world, I’m genuinely thrilled that we finally elected the right man for this job.

It’s far from certain, though, that McCain’s recent transformation will be permanent, or that he will support his party’s charge to oppose the solutions offered by the Democrats.  When McCain returns to the Senate, he might very well change back into his pre-2007 self.  If he does, then I think that’s an event we should all welcome with open arms, not rolling eyes.

I’m not saying that Democrats should make any effort to accommodate McCain or his supporters, and I’m not saying that Democrats should “govern from the center” - whatever that means.  What I’m saying is that, over the next few years, there’s going to be a group of angry, fanatical people who form the remains of the Republican Party.  I don’t think those people will consider McCain to be a member of their club, and I think things can only get better from here if we acknowledge that on this issue, they just might be right.

Cross-posted at Daily Kos.

UPDATE: Via Digg, here’s the last part of a series in Esquire by Chris Jones, tracking John McCain’s descent from 2006-2008.

Obama wins! Even Florida came through in the end.

UPDATE: Here’s a website that clearly and concisely answers the question, “Is Obama President?”

Looks like some people are starting to lose it:

Matt Yglesias at Think Progress reminds us that, had Al Gore prevailed in 2000, most of the people who currently support Barack Obama for President might instead be supporting Joe Lieberman.

I guess we really were in a lose-lose back then.

My sister just sent me some pictures from yesterday’s massive rally for Barack Obama in Miami’s Bayside Park. Yes, the pictures are kind of blurry (she must have been shaking with excitement!), but she was there.

And here’s one of the crowd:

By the way, the point of this rally was to kick off early voting, which has just begun in Florida. So if you live in Florida, you can go vote anytime between now and Tuesday, November 4. If you want to avoid the lines, you’re probably gonna want to get moving on that sooner rather than later.

Living outside the U.S., I don’t watch a lot of news on TV, and I have to say that I don’t really miss it.

But I would like to see the rest of this interview with Colin Powell, former Secretary of State (under George W. Bush) and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (under George H. W. Bush):