He should have seen ad written about the photo exhibits upstairs at the Amerika Haus election party too, complete with smiling people holding the US flag upside down, shouting and screaming, a photo-essay fixated on seeing American culture through the travels of a German coke bottle, etc. It was ripe with the cheap, easy, stupid and obvious cliches of people not terribly familiar with Americans and American life.

All that to say that the expression of feeling, including the adulation and expectation has many sides to it. It easiest to understand as a form of projecting ones' hopes and frustrations on the election specifically. Otherwise it's projected on whatever idea an individual has of America in the abstract where there no specific event like an election to dwell on.

The relvance of those feelings expressed also has limitations. I'm afraid that for the most part the don't really have a large stake in what form the White House really takes, even those who are US citizens living abroad as to what policies it carries out and so forth in the way that Americans living stateside do.

The degree to which that they are actual stakeholders is limited.

Can we take a cue from 8 years of the lefty social monopoly on dramatic exxagerated tantrums, and call that gathering a "cabal"?

Although you would probably like to think of that moment as some sort of great moment for constitutional fundamentals, all it was was a party-political rally. Other peple have them too, and they don't try to sell it as mythical and heroic CPR for humanity.

Instead of trying to invent a legend and folk/generational/populist/inspirational hero out of someone who has yet to even take office or accomplish anything as an elected official, why not look at the election of a Democrat as an opportunity to propose actual ideas to the public?

This unjustified emotionalism and lionizing before the fact is dangerous to the people who engage in it. It's the problem of people who try to make a charismatic leader out of a mere human. It's also deeply dishonest because you know full well that the same people who do that will not look honestly at their guy's errors.

You're right that have come a long way from 1887. Tell that to the activists trained into class-struggle theory and the methods of the Frankfurt school who continue to seem enamored with repeating endlessly selective social flaws from the past that only applied to society in the past as a means of cutting others out of discourse and making effective non-citizens out of anyone who disagrees with their world view - just as there was and is a huge need for Fox News and the Wall Street Journal, because the balance of the media is unwilling and incapable of intellectual inclusion.

If the past trends in leftist activism is a guide, we will likely end up with union run dirgisme that will divide the population, and diminish the economic future for the entire population, especially those not in unionized sectors. It will also ventually make party-politcal alignment a tacit requirement for those sectors of the economy as well.
The social commenters, those unproductive parasites, will try to wrap it in a veneer of inexplicable intangibles like social solidarity, social justice, and will as past trends show, use it for no reason other than to construct the same monopoly on political power that they have in education and academia.

It's as destructive as the behavior of one-party states, and it's what you get with charismatic-centered concepts of leadership. Ultimately, it pushes the trend in the direction of strong-man politics.

I wonder if it would be germaine to do as the democrats did, and insist that street canvassers "get in the face" of people, and ask them aggressively who they're going to vote for and why? Is it becuase they want the political paybacks to the unions or the shakedowns of companies productive enough to actually employ people?

All I see so far is a few decent appointments to treasury and commerces, and a blatantly venal appointment of someone with absolutely no affinity for the job and a spouse with a huge number of conflicts of interest at Dept. of State.

This isn't Hope, but it is Change - a change to a really sad age of 19th century style vote-buying back room deals. It's city politics brought to the world stage.

I have volunteered in campaigns, and no, they aren't all won by sweating people and branding them with fear, playing games for mere power over angry popular factions, and riot-exciting class-warfare arguments.

All you have to do is walk off of the plantation to discover that.