Well, it’s over. John McCain’s going back to the Senate. Vice President-elect Joe Biden can finally relax and spout off a few of those off-color jokes he’s had to keep buried deep down ever since Sarah Palin’s nomination. As for the spunky governor herself, she’s headed back to Alaska, where she will likely spend the next four years combating what the Republican base believes represent the biggest threats to the country: gay marriage, abortion, global warming theory and wolves.

The Obama campaign, despite offering an indisputably more inspiring message to America than McCain-Palin, nevertheless can attribute its success last night in large part to a vicious economic crisis that sent voters into panic and drove them away from the cultural issues and foreign policy concerns that motivated President Bush’s 2004 victory.

However, there is still a certain kind of vindication in the win. The Democratic victory fundamentally means that voters recognize the Republican Party is not the default answer for economic problems. Although Republican supply-siders have made a consistent claim that Democratic big-government economics stifle economic progress, the voters have wisely discarded this logic in favor of a more realistic and civilized economic agenda.

Americans are finally coming to grips with their support for a welfare state. No, I don’t mean the kind of welfare where the government delivers a Cadillac to your doorstep the day you decide to stop working. I’m talking about the system set up in virtually every other industrialized nation. A system that treats health care as a right, not a luxury and recognizes education as the cornerstone of national economic progress.

America is a country rich enough to provide a system in which laid off workers do not need to forfeit their family’s health care or give up on dreams of sending their children to college.

In earlier days, Americans didn’t expect these services and therefore didn’t demand them from their government. But they did expect basic public education and retirement pensions, which the New Deal provided under the leadership of Franklin D. Roosevelt and a Democratic Congress.

Lyndon B. Johnson attempted to further the cause of economic justice with his Great Society program during the mid-’60s. However, that “bitch in Vietnam,” which this paper shamefully supported, drained his political and fiscal clout and left the task to Richard Nixon, who tried with surprising dedication to work for necessary social programs, including universal health care, but as many of you know, had his own issues that blocked success.

Shortly after Nixon left office America entered a period of economic malaise, with inflation soaring at rates that would plague the administrations of Presidents Ford and Carter and give rise to the Reagan revolution.

This is where the U.S. went astray. In its frustrations with presidents who couldn’t fix the economy, Americans turned to a president who assured them that if the government simply left the scene, the economy would fix itself.

That message was still deeply ingrained in the national psyche during the 1990s. Although Bill Clinton — a charismatic southerner running against a feeble George Bush Sr. — won election twice on economic platforms, he did so by attacking the incumbent who necessarily raised taxes and retreated from the issue of health care. He also forfeited the issue of welfare to the Republicans, who pushed through a reform package that treated poverty as merely a symptom of laziness. According to Republican conventional wisdom of the time, America, despite being the hardest-working and most productive nation on earth, nevertheless had entire neighborhoods, towns, cities and states languishing in third world-like poverty.

However, perhaps the 21st century has finally laid waste to the idea that the central duty of the president is the upkeep of the economy. The economy, as any economics major will tell you, is cyclical. The global economy has made predicting economic development increasingly difficult and workers less secure in their jobs.

The answer to these insecurities is not protectionism or the “closing of corporate loopholes.” Barack Obama, despite some of his lip-service to such populism, likely understands this.

With economic recession at the nation’s doorstep, and the national debt having more than doubled during the last eight years of “compassionate conservatism,” America‘s president-elect’s stated goal is to extend health care to millions of uninsured Americans, and hopefully, all Americans. Obama has revived John F. Kennedy’s belief in national service programs, which reward poor and middle-class students who are willing to work for their country with a college education. Given his experience in urban communities, he is likely also aware that true education reform involves more than the simple test-taking strategies the Bush administration has given us and McCain has enthusiastically bought into.

Education and health care. This is the kind of change Americans need.

However, there’s still that bitch in Iraq. It’s already cost us a budget’s worth of money. The tragedy of the Obama presidency may very likely be that no matter how much the country supports its goals to extend the basic tenets of a proper civilization to the American people, it will be interminably prevented from doing so because of the previous president’s savagery.

Jack Craver ([email protected]) is a junior majoring in history.