Transformation

There's going to be a lot of Sunday morning quarterbacking, more like post-game analysis on why Obama did so well, but there's an article in the Sunday New York Times that I find particularly illuminating, about how the electorate of "Reagan Democrat" Levittown, PA went, in five months, from being unlikely to vote for a black man named Barack Hussein Obama for President to overwhelmingly going his way. For example:

I spent Election Day at a voting site inside the Magic Cottage preschool in a section of Levittown called Appletree, where Mr. Obama would defeat Mr. McCain, 682-388, a ratio slightly higher than the Democratic registration edge in that precinct. Not a single one of the more than 60 Obama voters I talked to said they had voted for him in the spring. Some said they had come around slowly, and many reported that they had been open to Mr. McCain.

So the Obama message of "change" was very real, down to the individual level -- admittedly racist adults having their attitudes flipped by him and his campaign, at least as far as this precious right and momentous decision.

Thankfully, the transformation, the change, seems to be real all the way up to explicitly reversing executive orders by El Presidente Bush, starting with those most damaging to the environment:

A team of four dozen advisers, working for months in virtual solitude, set out to identify regulatory and policy changes Obama could implement soon after his inauguration. The team is now consulting with liberal advocacy groups, Capitol Hill staffers and potential agency chiefs to prioritize those they regard as the most onerous or ideologically offensive, said a top transition official who was not permitted to speak on the record about the inner workings of the transition.

I guess that what the Presidential pen giveth, the succeeding Presidential pen taketh away.

Obama will need to move fast to reassure America and, in particular, his base of supporters that he means what he campaigned on, budget crisis or not. So I'm looking forward to these moves, maybe even starting late Inauguration Day.

On the other hand, there will be plenty of January Presidential pardons that he'll be unable to undo. Will it include convicted felons like Libby and Abramoff...or/also Cheney, Rove, Rumsfeld, Addington, Yoo, Gonzales...

...well, my fingers could get tired just listing them all.