To all participating government and politics students:
Thank you so much for spending much of your time reading various media and each other – often imparting your own ideas – to generate constructive political discourse related to the election. I do believe there is great value in tools like blogs to democratize learning, and your involvement only reinforced that belief. Beside completing this post, you will receive a written evaluation that I hope you complete to help me and other educators who make an attempt to create a similar forum.
For this final post, there will be no media to read/view, only your original thoughts. The campaign season was exhaustive and unpredictable even for political junkies like me, but the results were somewhat anticlimatic despite the historic nature of the election (the polls were remarkably accurate). With a decisive win, President-Elect Obama has a relatively clear mandate to govern with public support and a majority in Congress, yet, despite your political affiliations, there is no doubt that expectations are exceedingly high for Obama’s performance (i.e., I’ve seen articles beginning with..Franklin Delano Obama).
Discussion Questions:
Using common paradigms for other presidents:
What does Obama need to accomplish in his first 100 days? What does he need to accomplish in his first term?
Looking into the future, what will historians/political scientists write most prevalently about with regard to the 2008 presidential election?
**Note: Although I am not an historian (more of a social scientist), one of the most impressive qualities of weblogs is that they are historic/social artifacts. This blog will never disappear (unless I remove it, and I won’t), and you can always refer back to the ideas contributed to it, especially your own. Twenty years from now, perhaps students will read the comments of peers their own age to learn about a critical election in history rather than reading about it from textbooks.

