Election left questions, concerns

Sometimes the questions left unanswered are the most important ones.

That’s true again in the aftermath of the historic election of Barack Obama.

John McCain’s honorable exit, even amid a few boos and hisses from supporters, raised questions about where that McCain had been for the past two months. His campaign had turned gnarly and angry this fall, and maybe he was right in believing that his only path to the White House was over a mountain of doubt about Obama. But TV commentators, noting McCain’s grace and conciliation in his concession speech from Phoenix, called that the real McCain.

We’ve heard that before, most lately with Bob Dole in 1996 and Al Gore in 2000. Dole was stern and curmudgeonly when he was seeking votes, funny and self-deprecating afterwards. Gore was stiff and preachy during his marathon struggle with George W. Bush, more humble and scholarly when it was over.

What does this teach us? That some politicians simply do not fit on the biggest stage when the harshest lights are on them. Maybe the most important thing we learned about Obama over the past 21 months was his ability to stay focused on a mission – getting elected – during one of the most tumultuous economic periods in American history.

For the sake of the country, we must hope that was an innate – not tactical – trait that Obama can apply to the country as well as he applied it to his own ambitions.

Obama is now about to find out that getting elected and governing are fundamentally different. He might do well to ask Bush how a candidate that eight years ago ran on a humble, anti-nation-building foreign policy platform and on keeping government within its means will be leaving Obama two wars, chillier relations with allies and adversaries, and a government that is $10 trillion in debt.

Obama’s election is a pivot point in American history, ranking with Lincoln’s and Franklin Roosevelt’s. Nearly a century and a half after the evil of slavery was abolished, Americans have crossed a racial threshold on which there is no retreat. But because these are not normal times with normal challenges, Obama will be predominantly judged on what he does in perilous days ahead. His signature achievement of getting elected against big odds, as grueling as it was, nonetheless leaves many questions about how he will act as commander in chief and chief executive of a government that is more involved in Americans’ lives than virtually any time in history.

As a welcoming gift, the Government Accountability Office on Thursday issued its top “urgent issues” for the next president. They are: caring for service members; defense readiness; defense spending; food safety; Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan; oversight of financial institutions and markets; preparing for large-scale health emergencies; protecting the homeland; public diplomacy and international broadcasting; retirement of the space shuttle; surface transportation; the 2010 census; transition to digital TV.

And just for good measure, one could add restoring Americans’ faith in their government, their financial institutions, and themselves.

Too much for one man?

Absolutely.

This is why Obama would do well to revive John F. Kennedy’s “ask not” charge of 1960 and challenge for real.

Consume less. Live smarter. Cherish the nonmaterial. Revise an ethic of self-sufficiency. Curb the animus toward people who think differently than you. Think of your children when you make demands of government.

If a moment was ever ripe for such an era of recalibration, it is now.

The period of pandering is over.

Does Obama have the audacity to lead America to something fundamentally difficult, and fundamentally different?