This Morning 11/6/12 Rich White Guy Loses to Skinny Bi-Racial Dude

Obama won his re-election bid for POTUS.
He won the "battleground" states of PA, OH, VA, FL, CO, NH and WI, with close percentage points in VA, OH and FL, but the margins elsewhere were decidedly an Obama majority.

So, what does it mean?

Beside the opportunity to institute Healthcare reform in the U.S., which has been the most important overall campaign goal of this administration, the ending of the U.S. military occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan will be welcomed changes in Obama's second term.  Redirecting all that military funding into domestic social programs would mean helping more of the 99% to empower themselves and getting the economy back into a positive slope.

As for the title of this piece - Rich White Guy Loses to Skinny Bi-Racial Dude - it is a wink and nod to a recent article I've read.  Martha Finnemore, author of The Purpose of Intervention: Changing Beliefs About the Use of Force, references the changing face of social norms regarding humanitarianism, human rights and sovereignty issues as shaping the public's normative contexts concerning rights and duties.  Overall, she argues, a change in the attitudes about these issues will tend to extend into behaviors of State's  (meaning country's) political and State's population's behaviors.  Hence...

The re-election of Barack Obama, a half-white, half-African man raised by his low-middle class grandparents instead of electing a rich white capitalist businessman speaks volumes about what is now important to the American electorate.  We cannot talk about the problem of wealth disparity in this country and elect a man who has never walked into a grocery store to buy his own food!

Symbolically, the minority black youth defeating the distant white conservative is a metaphor for the ushering of new ideas and norms of identification by the U.S. populace.  We are now more willing to allow the construct of "difference" to be representative of our ideals.  This change in perception is meaningful.  The black-skinned man, once a symbol of something less-than human, not worthy of human rights, or perceived with fear and associated with gangs, has been given the confidence again to represent our country more coherently than the white guy.  It is what we are more comfortable with. This victory is somehow more purposeful than the original election of Barack Obama four years ago.

Further enforcing this paradigm shift is the subject of gay marriage, on the ballots of four states, which appears to be passing into law in several.  As well, an openly gay woman has been chosen for the U.S. Senate in Wisconsin.  These are examples of  historical norms fading into extinction.

These shifting norms, evidenced in this election, can give us real hope that Finnemore's theories about social liberalism are having an effect that tastes much sweeter than anything a rich guy's money can buy.