So are they all, all honorable men... looking forward to policies, not personalities.

Election's over. My side lost. Time to move on. This post is largely in response to some of the insane criticism that my blog-friend Patterico is receiving for having the temerity to say, after the election, that President-Elect Obama is basically a decent guy who means well, however bad his policy prescriptions may be for the country. Both other bloggers and his own regular commenters pile on Patterico, further demonizing our incoming President. Those critics of basic decency and respect miss the mark, on several fronts.

First, as members of a pluralistic society, we must have some basic level of respect for those with whom we disagree, regardless of the legitimacy of those disagreements. When lefties said, after 2004, that George Bush is "stupid" and a "moron," they were insulting not just President Bush, but all those who voted for him. When lefty Hollywood types threatened to leave the country, if President Bush were to be elected (or reelected), they were saying to all of those who voted for the President: "I dislike your politics so much, I don't want to even live in the same country with you." That's not a recipe for a strong and healthy society.

Second, it's not helpful. I think that President-Elect Obama's associations with Rev. Wright, Bill Ayers, and a whole other class of far-left, really out there people revealed character flaws and attitudes which I don't think we should have in a President. For better or for worse, over 50% of the voters disagreed with me. We didn't manage to make the case. Yes, I think the press paid far less attention to those associations than it tends to do with Republican associations with far right folks (remember how utterly horrible it was that George Bush gave one lousy speech at Bob Jones University?), but the bottom line is, we lost. We didn't make the case. No matter how much we think the public SHOULD have cared, they didn't. They saw in Sen. Obama the moderate man his rhetoric made him out to be, and that's who they voted for. To continue with the relentless personal, character-driven attacks will not persuade any of those folks that they made the wrong choice. Psychologically, it will only drive them further to defend that choice.

Why does all this matter? Because there are BIG battles ahead. President-Elect Obama is no dummy. He's a smart, calculating politician, schooled in the politics of South Side Chicago. He knows how to get things done. I'll be posting more later on what he's likely to push first, where the weak spots he intends to exploit are, but the point right now is that those battles are coming. We can win those battles by fighting on the policies rather than the personalities. The personality was important to the campaign. It is now irrelevant. We win no support for opposing a reimposition of the Fairness Doctrine by demonizing President-Elect Obama. We DO win support in that fight by showing that we are decent, civil, reasonable people, who are motivated by principle rather than hatred or personal dislike.

If nothing else, recall the successful speech of Marc Antony in Shakespeare's Julius Ceaser. Antony knew he faced a crowd of people who had been temporarily won over with the silver tongue of Brutus and the other conspirators. He knew that they were buying into what Antony considered to be Brutus' lies about Caesar's character. A speech beginning "Brutus is a dishonorable, lying scoundrel" would have been tuned out the moment he began. Instead, Antony kept repeating that Brutus was an honorable man, while he carefully eviscerated every specific argument that Brutus had made against Caesar. By the end of the speech, he had turned the crowd entirely against Brutus... but he began it a voice of utter sincerity proclaiming that Brutus was an honorable man. We must all now be Antonys.