Georgetown Law Alumni Magazine - Res Ipsa Loquitur
Spring/Summer 2009 - Online Volume 1
Lectures and Events
A Last Look at the Election
No one knew the outcome of the 2008 presidential election when a distinguished group of journalists joined CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer at Georgetown Law on October 22, 13 days before “E-Day.” Still, those daring to make an outright prediction at the start of the evening were fairly certain that Barack Obama would be living in the White House come January. “The mathematics of this look as if it’s almost impossible for this race to go the other way, in the absence of an act of God,” columnist and Pulitzer Prize winner Charles Krauthammer said. “It looks as if, at least this year, God is a Democrat.”
The forum, “Decision ’08: November 4 and Beyond,” was sponsored by the Law Center and Georgetown’s Public Policy Institute. It was, as Dean of Admissions Andy Cornblatt noted, the eighth time that Blitzer had moderated a Law Center event.
“Every time we ask Wolf, he always says yes,” said Cornblatt — recalling his joke at a previous symposium that Blitzer would be given a law degree if he moderated any more events at Georgetown Law. “One more time, he will be on our faculty; two more, perhaps the dean of the law school.”
Sharing the stage with Blitzer and Krauthammer were Washington Post columnist and Georgetown University Professor E.J. Dionne Jr., pollster and political strategist Celinda Lake, Clarence Page of the Chicago Tribune, and Byron York of the National Review.
Dionne, who teaches at Georgetown University’s Public Policy Institute, boiled the race down to simply “Bush, McCain, Palin, Black September and Obama,” noting that Obama’s ability to adopt a crisp economic message helped him when the financial crisis hit. It was a political landscape that no one could have predicted in February 2008, when Krauthammer and Dionne joined Blitzer for an earlier Law Forum in Hart Auditorium — and words like “bailout” and “meltdown” were not yet on anyone’s lips.
“Now, all we can think about is this economic meltdown; a few months ago, all we could think about was the price of gas,” York said at the end of the event, noting that no one knows just what great test a president might be called upon to face. “In the 2000 election, the burning question was what were we going to do with our fantastic surplus. … You don’t know what you are electing this person for.”
