Gobama or Nobama - What to make of it all?

I've been meaning to write about the new President-Elect for the past few days, but I thought I needed a cooling off period after my feelings of joy and relief subsided. I want to take a measured look at the whole thing so a post that would have been essentially OMG OBAMA FTMFW!!! might have been a tad asinine.

Now I definatly believe that Obama will be a much better president than McCain and the crazy lady who hates Polar Bears would ever have been but he's not going to be the guy us progressives have been calling out for. His ideas about the economy are mostly sound and his stance on civil rights, education and energy policy is fine for the most part. However he has indicated he still wants to be BFF with Israel (undivided? seriously?) and he supports rewarding bankers for their foolishness/greed... oh I mean the bailout. Oh (and this is a big one) he also voted FOR the Patriot Act... gosh darnit.

Now I still think if he doesn't surround himself with idiots Obama can get a lot of good done, but he isn't perfect, nor should we expect him to be, but we definatly need to hold him account and question some of the things he's doing. We can't give him a free ride just because he's better than 'the other guy'.

The other thing I wanted to talk about was the big one; race. No, don't shut off your internet browser or throw your computer through the window, this is important. I've already started to see some of the stupid stuff being spouted by a lot of people I had feared we'd see if Obama won. Racism Is Over™ and 'how can we be racist if elected a black guy?'. Now this post-racial crap has been floating around for a while now but now a lot of people have an easy response to any sign of the dreaded R and that's Obama.

This is stupid and problematic on several levels, first of all people tend to just talk about racism in the terms of black and white, this is obviously crap when you consider all the brown, yellow and 'miscellaneous' peoples of the world (I constantly lament the lack of a specific box come census time, must I be cursed as an 'Other' till my dying days!?). Then even with black people, Obama can easily fall in the category of 'exceptions to the rule' or to say it another way 'Oh wow, you speak so well! I hardly even noticed you're black!'. Obama being elected isn't going to stop a large group of people thinking Native Americans are drunks and East-Asians are subservient and whatever other stupid things people seem to believe.

Now Obama being elected is a great event and does show just how far we have come, but it doesn't mean that Racism Is Over™ and that we all need to stop whining. Now the only thing left for me to worry about is the fact that Obama's administration seems to be shaping up to be a sausage-fest, seriously get Sebellius in there if you can, she rocks.

Is it wrong to imagine that she's saying 'I own this shit'? Didn't think so.