While I tend to stay away from secular politics, I will wade is a short way here but try to provide a connection back to how the events of yesterday resonate with me spiritually and polity-wise.

First, congratulations to President-elect Obama.  Your position on my daily prayer list has moved up a few notches.  (Bruce, Byron, and my pastor are still ahead of you however.)  It was an interesting campaign to watch and marks a milestone in American history — we as a people have taken one more step to being a color-blind nation.  In a couple of respects it was a troubling campaign to follow, but more on that in a minute.  But in spite of its failings, our democratic system does work, for the most part.

To Senator McCain, I highly respect your graciousness in defeat.  The speech you gave last night showed the depth of your character and why you are a great man, even if you will never hold the highest office in the land.  Regarding your moral failings, which all of us have, I always felt that you were direct and forthright about them.  I have the feeling that others in the political arena try to deny, spin, or minimize their own past mistakes.  And I greatly respect and appreciate the fact that you took the public funding route, still recognizing that there are other paths to raising and spending money in these campaigns.

That brings me to one major issue that disturbed me in this long, and sometimes bitter, multi-year run.  I always hope that our better nature will prevail, but when campaigns turn negative I remind myself that as a Reformed Christian I know of the pervasiveness of our sinful nature.

The other major issue is the money spent — the cost of these elections, particularly for Senator Obama who did not take the public funding and so could fund raise and spend at will.  How many dollars per vote were spent in this election?  Is it worth the cost?  What other uses could the money be spent on?  I won’t go into details but I would love to see the presidential campaign boil down to a couple of debates, a few televised speeches, and a published piece where each candidate could lay out their policy proposals in a form that was substantive but concise and then it also contained a critique by the other candidates.  This probably comes from my academic perspective.  The attack ads, sound bites, and infomercials drive me crazy and leave me basically cynical and feeling it is not worth my time.

Now, to be a real fatalist I refer you to the work of a colleague of mine who turned his earthquake prediction research to predicting presidential elections.  The method, published 27 years ago, has correctly predicted every U.S. Presidential election since then.  I asked him months ago who they predicted and he called it for the Democrat by a large margin.  This was before the specific candidate was even known.  It turns out the economy and the individual in office are the important factors, not the personalities, money spent, or campaign promises.  Now if it would only work as well for earthquakes.

Here on the Left Coast the state presidential outcome was not in question, but the fight over same-sex marriage was (and still is since the outcome is still too close to call this morning) the hot-button issue.  Much money was spent on Proposition 8, about $70 million total, almost equally divided between the two sides.  In the neighborhood I live in I know of no one with a Yes on 8 sign or bumper sticker that did not lose at least one to theft or vandalism.  There was a report the police tracked down a man who was paying teenagers $2 a sign to steal them.  The reverse was true in the neighborhood where I work where yesterday morning on election day No on 8 signs that were there the day before had been replaced with Yes on 8.  By the afternoon the No on 8 were back.  And in multiple locations in the state fist fights have broken out between supporters and opponents of the measure.  Again, it was not always civil discourse.

At least the PC(USA) has been a bit more restrained in the advocacy on each side, even if this and related issues still deeply divides us.  Currently the vote count is leaning in the direction that the PC(USA) General Assembly decided by a wide margin this past summer.  But everyone agrees that no matter the outcome on this vote it is by no means the end of the controversy, again, just like the PC(USA).

In an interesting linkage between the presidential vote and the Prop 8 vote there is the cautionary tale of not viewing all people as the same, and the law of unintended consequences.  In an unusual twist one reason that Proposition 8 may pass is because Senator Obama was on the ballot.  While the white democrat vote pretty reliably was against Prop 8, many of the black and Hispanic supporters of Mr. Obama are socially conservative and the potential margin of victory may lie in the record turn-out from those groups.  (There is a Wall Street Journal article that mentions this and by some accounts black voters supported Prop 8 by 70% to 30% and Hispanic voters by a small majority.)  Be careful what you wish for, you might get it.

So my concluding thought is the reminder that in the church, as in the population at large, we are not a homogeneous group and the issues of one part of the demographic are not necessarily those of another part.  We need to ready to listen to all viewpoints and not paint with too wide a brush.