Don't Know Much About History, Anniversary Edition: Everything You Need to Know About American History but Never Learned (Don't Know Much About®) (98 page)

The first African-American to be elected president of the United States, Barack Obama won the election with 52.93 percent of the popular vote to McCain’s 45.65 percent. No third-party candidate had a serious impact on the race this time, unlike in 2000, when Ralph Nader was widely thought to be a “spoiler” who hurt Al Gore’s prospects. In the electoral vote, Obama won 365 votes to McCain’s 173, a fairly convincing if not sweeping victory.

“He had secured a victory,” wrote John Heilemann and Mark Halperin in their book
Game Change
:

that was as dazzling as it was historic. His 53 percent of the popular vote was the largest majority secured by a Democrat since Lyndon Johnson. He swept the blue [traditionally Democratic] states, captured the battlegrounds of Pennsylvania, Ohio and Florida, and picked up red [traditionally Republican] states across the country: Colorado, Indiana, North Carolina, Virginia. He dominated among black voters (95–4), Hispanic voters (66–32), and young voters (66–32). His share of the white vote, 43 percent, was higher than what Gore or Kerry had attained—and among whites age eighteen to twenty-nine, he trounced McCain, 68–31.

In both the primary campaign against Hillary Clinton and the general election, Obama had effectively used the Internet, especially in raising campaign contributions and appealing to younger voters, a generation much less influenced by political traditions of race, geography, or gender. And in that sense, his election was transforming.

Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, founder of an influential Internet site called Daily Kos, a liberal-progressive blog, saw Obama’s win as representing “the future of our nation—young and multicultural. And the exit polling suggests that Republicans are headed for some rough waters ahead if they don’t recognize this. . . . The white vote kept McCain peripherally competitive. But Republicans are tentatively holding onto a shrinking portion of the electorate, while Democrats enjoy massive advantages with the fastest growing demographics.”

A
MERICAN
V
OICES

PRESIDENT-ELECT BARACK OBAMA
, speaking at Chicago’s Grant Park following his victory, on election night, November 4, 2008:

If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible; who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time; who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.

President Obama arrived in the White House to be greeted by two wars and a financial crisis unequaled since the Great Depression. The severe economic downturn began officially in December 2007, a fact not declared until much later, and ended in June 2009. This crisis, which some have called the Great Recession, played out while the Obama administration also pledged to tackle major reforms in the financial industry, salvage a teetering American automobile industry confronting the once unthinkable idea of the demise of General Motors, close the notorious and controversial prison facility maintained by the U.S. military at a base in Guantánamo, Cuba—and overhaul the nation’s health-care policies.

In a little over a year, the Obama administration—usually in the face of united Republican opposition—had completed what the financial journalist David Leonhardt of the
New York Times
called “16 months of activity that rival any other since the New Deal in scope or ambition. Like the Reagan Revolution or Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, the new progressive period has the makings of a generational shift in how Washington operates.”

In fairly rapid succession, the Obama administration crafted an economic stimulus bill that also set out to reform and remake the nation’s educational system. In May 2009, Obama nominated Sonia Sotomayor to replace the retiring Supreme Court justice David Souter. Born in the Bronx, New York, of Puerto Rican descent, she had been appointed to the federal court by George H. W. Bush and elevated by Bill Clinton. After being nominated by Obama, Sotomayor was confirmed by the Senate in August 2009, becoming the first Hispanic justice (and the third woman) in the history of the Supreme Court. In August 2010, Obama made a second appointment to the Supreme Court when his solicitor general, Elena Kagan, the former dean of Harvard Law School, was confirmed by the Senate. When Kagan took her seal in October 2010, it marked the first time that three women had served on the Supreme Court concurrently. As both women replaced so-called liberal members of the Supreme Court, they were not expected to change the balance of what had become one of the most “conservative” Courts in recent history.

After months of contentious and brutal debate, Obama also signed a health-care reform bill—a few weeks after the death of its greatest champion in the Senate, Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts—that created the largest expansion of the nation’s social safety net in half a century. The bill was intended to expand insurance coverage largely for middle-class and poor families and paid for some of it by taxing households making more than $250,000 a year. Obama then set out to revise the nation’s financial rules, in a way to specifically address the excesses that led to both the dot-com crash and the meltdown that in turn led to the Great Recession.

The crucial midterm elections of 2010 arrived with the nation still mired in a sluggish economy, with few new jobs being created, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan continuing, and a disgruntled electorate unhappy with both Congress and President Obama. As popular dicontent grew over taxes, the role of the government, and uncertainty about the health-care reform that had been passed, there was a significant power shift in Washington. Winning sixty-three seats in the House, in what the president himself called a “shellacking,” the Republicans regained control of the lower chamber of Congress. The Republicans also gained six Senate seats, and while the Democrats retained their majority there, the Obama administration would be moving into its second half with his abilities to shape the country’s agenda sharply curtailed.

A
MERICAN
V
OICES

JUDGE LEWIS A. KAPLAN
, of the United States District Court in Manhattan, October 6, 2010:

The court has not reached this conclusion lightly. It is acutely aware of the perilous nature of the world in which we live. But the Constitution is the rock upon which our nation rests. We must follow it not when it is convenient, but when fear and danger beckon in a different direction.

Judge Kaplan wrote this as part of a decision that barred prosecutors from using a crucial witness in the trial of a former Guantánamo detainee. The witness excluded by the judge had been identified and located after the accused man had been interrogated in a secret overseas jail run by the CIA. The accused terrorist’s lawyers said he had been tortured there.

To the American Nazi party, Hustler magazine, and other odious figures in Supreme Court history, add the Rev. Fred Phelps Sr. and the members of the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kan. Their antigay protests at the funeral of a soldier slain in Iraq were deeply repugnant but protected by the First Amendment. . . . One friend of the court brief called the protestors’ message “uncommonly contemptible.” True, but it is in the interest of the nation that strong language about large issues be protected, even when it is hard to do so.

—New York Times
editorial, October 7, 2010

In a case that was being heard by the United States Supreme Court, the
New York Times
and other press organizations filed a brief in support of a Kansas church group that held protests at the funerals of fallen American soldiers to express their opposition to homosexuality. The Kansas church members believed that “God hates homosexuality and hates and punishes America for its tolerance of homosexuality, particularly in the United States military,” according to the
Times
editorial. The Court had to decide if the First Amendment protected these protests.

Both of these cases—an accused terrorist being protected by the U.S. Constitution’s guarantees of a fair trial and the church group that intruded on the grief of soldiers’ families and claimed the protection of free speech—are part of the messy ripples of history.

The great historian Edward Gibbon once called history “little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.” Voltaire called it a trick played by the living upon the dead. According to Thomas Carlyle, history is “a distillation of rumor.” And Henry Ford said history is “more or less bunk.”

This American history is a little bit of these and then some. But one thing history is
not
is boring. History is alive and human—and changing all the time. We need to rewrite it. And we need to learn from it. America has survived a lot. Revolution. A civil war. Two world wars. Depressions and recessions. Presidents and politicians, bad and good. A cold war that took the world to the brink of mass destruction on more than one occasion. And then a terrorist attack that shook the very foundations of the country’s security and sense of trust.

As the country has taken its first uncertain steps into the new century, remembering America’s history becomes all the more important. What’s past, after all,
is
prologue.

Appendix 1
The Bill of Rights and Other Constitutional Amendments

M
eeting in New York City on September 25, 1789, the first Congress submitted twelve proposed changes to the Constitution—called articles or amendments—for ratification by the states. (See p. 131 for more on the Bill of Rights.) These amendments dealt with certain individual and states’ rights not specifically named in the Constitution. Ten of these articles, which were originally proposed as Amendments Three through Twelve, were declared ratified in 1791 and are now known as Amendments One through Ten, or the Bill of Rights. The other two amendments from the original list of twelve proposed were not ratified by the necessary number of states at the time. The first related to the apportionment of representatives; the second, relating to the pay of Congress, was finally ratified in 1992 and became Amendment Twenty-seven.

Since 1791, another seventeen changes have been made to the Constitution, a process that begins when Congress proposes an amendment, which must clear both the House and the Senate by a two-thirds majority. Although state conventions can propose amendments, all the existing amendments have been proposed by the Congress. The proposed amendment is sent to the states for ratification. Three quarters of the states are needed to ratify, and that is usually done by state legislatures (although there has been one exception; see Amendment Twenty-one).

Amendment One

Prohibits the establishment of religion. Guarantees freedom of religion, of speech, of the press, the right to assemble, and the right to petition.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Amendment Two

Guarantees the limited right to keep and bear arms.

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Among the most controversial and ambiguous of the amendments, the Second Amendment was intended to provide for the effectiveness of the militia, which would presumably protect the citizenry against Indians, foreign powers, or the power of the federal government, at a time when there was little or no standing army.

Under current court interpretations, it does not provide for unlimited gun ownership, but merely prevents the federal government from disarming the members of the National Guard. In decisions dating further back, the Supreme Court has consistently ruled that the Second Amendment does not bind the states, so that state and local governments are free to enact gun control laws if they desire. In the case of federal laws, since a 1939 case involving sawed-off shotguns,
United States v. Miller
, the courts have consistently held that the Second Amendment only confers a
collective
right to keep and bear arms, which must have a “reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia.” Congress has placed many restrictions on the manufacture, sale, transfer, and possession of weapons, and these statutes have all been upheld as constitutional.

Not everyone agrees with that interpretation, even though it has stood for more than sixty years. As constitutional scholar Leonard W. Levy writes, “The Second Amendment is as vague as it is ambiguous. Some think it upholds the collective right of state militias to bear arms, while others, probably more accurate in so far as original intent is concerned, argue that it protects the right of individuals to keep arms.”

Until 2002, no administration had challenged the so-called collective right established by
Miller
in 1939. But in 2002, Attorney General John Ashcroft announced that the Justice Department would seek to challenge the collective view in favor of the individual rights view, a stance vigorously supported by the National Rifle Association. In footnotes in two filings with the Supreme Court in May, the government said that the Second Amendment protected the rights of individuals “to possess and bear their own firearms, subject to reasonable restrictions designed to prevent possession by unfit persons or to restrict the possession of types of firearms that are particularly suited to criminal misuse.”