If the financial collapse of 2008 has taught us anything, it is the lesson of interdependence - that to have a healthy society and economy one group cannot prosper while the other goes downhill.
Obama was vilified because he dared to say the wealthy must pay higher taxes and suggested government's real purpose goes beyond maintaining courts, contracts or the military, that it has an inherent obligation to ensure all share in the country's economic wealth and to guarantee the fairest social justice possible to its citizens.
The modern day Republican Party has morphed into a caricature of wealth and elitism, today centralist Democrats are the moderate Republicans of past generations.
The presidential election put on display how wealth and elitism uses its power to control the political system. However, the unprecedented $6 billion spent by the Republican Party and its Super PACs to unseat Obama was for not.
The demographic makeup of America has changed, and Republican strategy ran counter to the hopes and fears of the huge middle class now made up of racial minorities.
A Pew Research poll of 2,048 adults found two-thirds (66 per cent) believe "very strongly" that conflicts between the rich and poor are a real issue, an increase of 19 per cent from 2009.
If anything, this is a tribute to the Occupy movement that has put this critical fact of modern day life on the public agenda, so that the people, who may experience it in their personal lives, now learned they are not alone.
It is now evident that the majority does sympathize with the goals and aims of the Occupy movement and this has created a community of mutual support and democratic exchange. This is significant in a society that has been force fed the principles of free markets that isolate people and break down communities.
When the voters looked at the choice between Obama and Romney, the majority saw a champion in Obama who is willing to stand up against the brutal, winner-take-all Darwinism of the corporate culture that has seized our social, economic and political system. Someone who offered the hope that no matter what the future holds we are all in it together.
Having just finished reading Arthur Schlesinger's "The Age of Roosevelt," I was struck by the interesting fact that Roosevelt, who fought against the wealthy oligarchy of bankers and industrialists of his day to implement his "New Deal," was so popular with the majority that he was elected to four consecutive terms as president.
It was only after his death the Republicans forced the passage of a law limiting future presidents to two terms.
Jon Peter Christoff,
West Kelowna