I happen to agree with both, Malooga’s stirring piece below (which I lifted from a comment), and John B. Judis’ analysis on America the Liberal

If Obama and the Democrats in Congress act boldly, they can not only arrest the downturn, but also lay the basis for an enduring majority. As was the case with Franklin Roosevelt, many of the measures necessary to combat the recession–such as spending money on physical and electronic infrastructure, adopting national health insurance–will also help ensure a Democratic majority. The rural South remained Democrat for generations because of Roosevelt’s rural electrification program; a similar program for bringing broadband to the hinterland could lead these voters back to the Democratic Party. And national health insurance could play the same role in Democrats’ future prospects that Social Security played in the perpetuation of the New Deal majority.

…
The Republican Party will be divided and demoralized after this defeat. Just as the Great Depression took Prohibition and the other great social issues of the 1920s off the popular agenda, this downturn has set aside the culture war of the last decades. It wasn’t a factor in the presidential election. And the business lobbies that blocked national health insurance in 1994 will incur the public’s wrath if they once again try to buy Congress.

If, on the other hand, Obama and the Democrats take the advice of official Washington and go slow–adopting incremental reforms, appeasing adversaries that have lost their clout–they could end up prolonging the downturn and discrediting themselves. What could have been a hard realignment could become not merely a soft realignment, but perhaps even an abortive one. That’s not the kind of change that America needs or wants–and, hopefully, Obama and the Democrats understand that.

—

by Malooga:

Remember those old TV commercials where the unsuspecting housewife
learns that her old brand of laundry detergent has been surreptitiously
replaced with a newer better brand, and she just can’t believe it?

Well, that’s what happened to us. The brand was changed with the
pre-planned financial collapse and the largest transfer of wealth in
human history. We all really know this, but because the corporate press
does not "catapult the propaganda" it still doesn’t seem real.

All we’re seeing now is the paper being peeled back to reveal the
new brand we will be using for the next four years. Sure, we’ll like
the tone and timbre of this new product, but the structural adjustments
were put into place well ahead of time.

A system whereby two corporate controlled images are put before us,
allowed to say whatever they want knowing that they will never be held
accountable (eg. Bush: humble foreign policy), and we are told that
voting for the preferrable image, who will then "represent" us; such a
system whereby the fetish act of voting is intended as a substitute for
actual democratic engagement (something most of us, as structurally
intended, have no time for anyway) is not a Democracy, but a triumph of
totalitarian propaganda.

(I have recently been involved in legislation at the State level,
and just to see how relatively innocuous legislation is taken hold of
by monied interests, how swans are turned into arcane pigs — too
complex for any but the smartest of those professionally involved in
all of this to grasp — given cute names, and foisted upon the
ignorant, prejudiced and fearful public; to see how these bulbous,
heinous, genetically-modified creatures are dumped on the public plate
and called meat is more than discouraging.)

So, what has happened? People have been so scared, so
shock-therapied, that they have endorsed a man who says things they
don’t advocate and cannot be held to his pronouncements anyway. Endless
articles have been written daily, on Counterpunch for one, detailing
those pronouncements, the advisors, where the unprecedented amounts of
moolah where coming from, but all of this counts for nothing for the
True Believers, where belief and hope short-circuit logic and strategy.
I’m sorry that Arthur Silber came up against some unforseen problems,
because his expected but unpublished series on tribalism promised far
more insight into this phenomenon than my poor mind is able to come up
with.

In the end, people are controlled by stimulating them until their
emotions overcome their reason. Resistance falls away and they are
easily lead.

What is so galling to me here is not the expectation that things
will change for the better in spite of all evidence to the contrary,
not this magical thinking, no, but the almost universal belief around
here that strategies for fundamental change come from elections and
that such strategies for fundamental change must necessarily be limited
to single election horizons, even if proved strategies, which could
take a generation to effect deep, meaningful, and life-affirming
change, exist. Obama Tina (There Is No Alternative, as Maggie Thatcher
used to say about the neo-conservative program). Just don’t labor under
any illusions that the elite limits their own plans and machinations to
single election spans. That’s not what think-tanks are for. So who has
the advantage in this contest, this game of chess — the voters, or the
ruling elite?

The ruling class has nothing in common with the common man,
indeed cannot have anything in common with him, because their job is to
control you. It’s called the ruling class because it rules. It doesn’t
matter how smiley the face you see and hear daily is — it will be just
as lethal because the beast is a shark and that is its nature. Yes,
crony dollars will now trickle down to the equally dirty democrats now,
but all others in its voracious path will be destroyed.

It was clear for quite some time that a much larger faction of the
ruling elite preferred the Obama image, knowing that USAans have had
their fill of the current public tenor. (If we stop bombing people, we
will go back to bombing water plants and farms. Peasants must be
starved before they will give up their farms and local foods and brands
and incorporated into the wage-slavery system as the new place to open
low-cost factories in the inevitable drive to the bottom. This is how
we won in Vietnam, and how we will inevitably win in Iraq and
Afghanistan. TINA. Starve them into submission, then let the NGO’s come
in and feed them.)

The corporate media could have destroyed Obama as easily as one
brushes away a gnat if they had wanted. No stories about what type of
underwear Obama wears, or whether his ears are too flappy, his suits
too loose, his face too much like Alfred E. Neuman’s. Instead, the
corporate media turned on McCain with a vengeance. The straight-talk
express of eight years ago became a mean, surly cur. The media manufactures consent and the public buys it.
Even those who study and know its rules fall for it. The images of the
two candidates could have been reversed with ease if those who own the
media had wanted it.

All of my research into the mechanics of elections over the past eight years have proven to me that this election could
have been stolen just as easily as the past two, if the elite had
wanted it. That they didn’t does nothing to restore my faith in the
ultimate justice and reliability of the system. Those who spent their
time campaigning may have helped assuage their own feelings of
hopelessness and uselessness, but the fix was in, and in the end they
changed nothing. (We have no idea how many votes were stolen in this
selection to preserve some sense of contest and excitement. (It is hard
to draw people into an inevitable confidence game.)

Well, it’s a new morning in America, or whatever the slogan this
time was. Ah yes, "Change." I advise you all to beware the pernicious
word "reform," which inevitably follows the word "change." Welfare
reform, entitlement reform, social security reform, health care reform.
Beware. Some fool here actually mentioned health care reform as a
reason to support Obama and no one called him out on it. First of all,
peel off the Orwellian use of words. We have no healthcare system in
the US. The rich can afford healthy food and safe working conditions
and less stress and clean air and non-polluted locales and the poor
cannot. What is hoped to be thrust down the gullets of the sheeple is a
catastrophic illness program, which would be well needed, but instead
is a give-away to the insurance industry, as pioneered in Massachusetts
by Mitt Romney (remember him?) whereby one is obligated by law to
purchase health insurance, regardless of your ability to pay, and
regardless of how flea-riddled said insurance proves to be.

Obama will not be a savior. He has no answer to the real structural
problems which are never addressed in elections: the fact that, as
Sheldon Wolin points out, we spend almost as much of our offensive
mlitary in this country as the sum total of all corporate profits
(ponder that and what it says about us as a people), or the fact that,
according to Derrick Jenson, plastic now outweighs phytoplankton in our
oceans by a ratio of six to one.

Change. Remember how seven years ago Shrub was drifting along
aimlessly when suddenly "A New Pearl Harbor" happened and the small
Bush was transformed into a wartime leader while the rest of us had
little option but to follow the piper? Detestable corporate-whore, now
VP Biden, has already informed us that if the protests for genuine
change become too loud we will be treated to a similar enactment. (As
Dr. Johnson said about the purpose of art: Instruct and delight,
instruct and delight.) Beware. We are soon to be instructed and
delighted.

Change never came from an election without social movements, just as love never came from a hand that happened to be your own.

So everyone here now has their candidate; even the casinos where I
live let you win every once in a while so you keep coming back. All of
those who invested time and energy in the campaign; all of those who
supported the duopoly by voting for Obama have every moral right to
take credit for any good they may have helped bring about. But, by the
same logic, every death — whether by bombing or democratic starvation
— that Obama brings about during the next four years, well, some small
part of the responsiblity, the guilt, the violence, the vengence, the
pain caused, and the lives shredded so effortlessly by the machine,
some part of that must also rightly accrue to you and your efforts.

Yes, even my pacifist housemate, whose father was a conscientious
objector during the "Good War," WWII, and later became a minister and
went to France to aid the afflicted, all at great personal cost, even
she voted for Obama and had no answer to my challenge. She does not
believe in killing under any circumstance (the simplified fairy-tale we
are sold about Gandhi), but she voted for a killer, a supporter of
murder, hence a murderer himself. I believe that the oppressed of the
world have the right to defend their lives against those who would
exterminate them — by violence and even by killing. But I could not
bring myself to share in the complicity of being, even in some small
measure, the oppressor of others, the killer, as Martin Luther King
said, "The greatest purveyor of violence in the world."

It’s a deadly game I want no part of, and I just couldn’t do it. I
could not bring myself to feed the machine of oppression, pillage and
murder.

Change. Enjoy. Bask. Even gloat. Your team won this time. The
tribal part of you, the "us against others" deserves to feel good. Hey,
what’s that red stuff on my hands?