The election is over. President Barack Obama has won a second term, much to the consternation of the political and religious right. And in some circles, his win is being called a landslide.
At what point does a win become a landslide? Slightly more than 2/3? And even if this could be considered as such, it is only an ELECTORAL COLLEGE one. We must remember that the popular vote was very close from a perspective of percentage: only three million votes out of more than a hundred million. No landslide there either.
Yet when George W. Bush took the White House with the same popular margin and a much lower electoral margin, the Republicans called that a landslide. So from that perspective, we might call Obamas' win a rout. Of course, the Republicans will deny this, telling us in so many words that we can't use the same criteria they did.
What the popular vote margin really means is that there are still almost half of the voting country that refuses to understand that we CANNOT go backwards if we are to return to our leadership position in the modern world. We cannot turn our backs on math and science as the extreme right would have us do. Nor can we turn our backs on the social progress we've made in our laws.
It's a basic truth of existence that we can't stand still; all of life is either progressive or regressive, and the regressive dies out and becomes extinct. Therefore, for our survival as a nation and as a power in this world, we MUST go forward; we MUST progress. We cannot afford to go backward as a society. That way lies the chaos of loss and anarchy.
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