Link
A pretty good summary of the campaign of the past week. Of course it leaves out the best part which the Daily Show pointed out the other night, where John McCain used Paris Hilton in an ad which royally pissed off her grandpa who's donated some $15,000 to McCain's campaign.
Actually it all fits with the stuff Ive been reading up on lately. Ive been reading up on the American generational theory as laid out in the book
Generations by Bill Howe and Neil Howe.
Basically we are at the end of an ideological era (the culture wars) which started up with the 1968 election of Richard Nixon, and are on the brink of a civic era (the last one was the Great Depression/WWII double crises on through the 50s and early 60s). The US has always alternated from civic to ideological eras much like the pumping of a piston in your cars engine, and it happens about every 30-40 years (thus the 2 combined adds up to about 80 years, or a long lifespan for most people).
McCain's campaign is doing all the stuff we usually see from an ideological era: the smearing, the lying, using wedge issues (though he's using offshore oil drilling over the traditional wedge issues of the culture war era like abortion or gay rights). Obama has been using the template that has been successful for those campaigns at the start of a civic era (the hope and change kind of stuff).
The article I linked to first had a Republican operative calling this a "change election". Another way to put it is a realigning election. Realigning elections almost always happen when you have a confluence of events merge together. The old political ways have lost their steam, a vast young dominant generation starts to come of age, and new technologies start to change the political process. In this election, its obvious the culture wars are (thankfully) on its last legs. For example, all the Republican candidates (well except Ron Paul) spent their entire primary campaign comparing themselves to Ronald Reagan. One other thing that usually marks the end of an ideological era is the scapegoating of immigrants or some other minority group on a large scale (the last such time, the 1920s, had some years where basically the legal immigrant population to the US was zero due to backlash against southern/eastern European immigrants). You have the vast civic-minded Millenial generation (those born between 1982 and 2002) coming of age, and if they're like previous civic generations like the GI/greatest generation they'll come to the polls in masses that you dont see from other generations like Baby Boomer or Gen-X'ers (as shown during the primaries). And as the Obama campaign has shown, the internet has greatly democratized the money element of running a campaign. During the last quarter, his average contributor donated an average of $68 a person, and he's blown away all the people who used the old method of fundraising where you get a bunch of big shots to a party where they give you the $2300 individual max (or the $12,500 max to a national committee like the RNC or DNC). Also his use of social networks like facebook, myspace, and his own mybarrackobama site which he uses as great grassroots organizing tools (something which most Republicans admit they are very much behind the curve on), as well as all the youtube videos his supporters make (something which I think the McCain camp has done a halfway decent job trying to keep up with).
What makes the first election of a realigning election so important if you're a partisan or an ideologue? It sets the stage for who's going to have the power and which way the country will go for the next 30-40 years. Nixon won the vote in 68, which set the stage for Republicans to win 7 of the next 10 Presidential elections (I could go into the explanations of the congress and why the GOP didnt win control of those till 94, but than it'd be alot of nuanced stuff that'll make this post extra long). And even the couple times Dems won, they were governing from Republican turf (for example, Bill Clinton couldnt get health care but he did balance the budget which was a big thing for 90s-era conservatives). Before that, in the previous civic era from 1932-67 Democrats won all but the 2 elections Ike won, and Eisenhower was very moderate compared to what we think of Republicans today, including such big government projects like the interstate highway system and starting up the space program (though a big part of that was also keeping the Rooskies at bay). And its worked that way going back to when Andrew Jackson became President.
One does get the sense though that even Boomers themselves are getting tired of their culture wars. Instead of choosing one of their many generational cohorts on the Republican side (Mitt, Rudy, Freddie), instead they chose McCain who's from the Silent Generation (those born in the 30s and early 40s...and interesting, at least to me, side note: if McCain doesnt win the Silents will be the first generation to not have one of their cohorts elected as President, though thats more to how dominant the GI generation was, from JFK through Bush I...and might have been different if RFK wasnt assisinated). Obama is a tail end Boomer (often called Generation Jones) who was too young participate in all the counterculter clashes of the late 60s or early 70s, but wasnt one of the many disillussioned youths (like yours truly) born a couple years later who grew up in a Gen-X angst-ridden environment.
Anyways, there's alot more nuance to this theory but I dont want to write a novel, and alot of it seems to jive, though a part of me is somewhat skeptical of at least some of it. But I started dwelving into it trying to get a sense of why so many younger people were so enamored with Obama. I just hope its not giving me the false sense to my biggest hope, the coming end of the culture wars and its conservative/liberal red state/blue state divisiveness and the masses electing politicians willing to tackle all the obstacle and crises that lay in its wake.