Celebrating President-elect Barack Obama in Santa Cruz
Spontaneous dancing in the street erupted in downtown Santa Cruz on Tuesday night. It wasn't New Year's Eve, or Mardi Gras. It wasn't about some team clinching the World Series or the Super Bowl. It was, of all things, political in nature, a subject that hasn’t offered us much to dance about over the last few years. But jubilation was the only possible response to the election of Barack Obama as the nation's 44th president.
It turns out this election was not about race. It was not about gender politics, or party politics. It wasn't even about how sick we all are of the cold-hearted weasel politics of the outgoing administration (although all of these things were certainly factors).
This election was about this guy. Barack Obama. It's hard to imagine anyone else who might have navigated the same set of factors to victory with as much skill, poise, intelligence and charisma.
Obama is not a terrorist, an Arab, a Muslim, a Marxist, a Socialist, or the Anti-Christ. He is what the American Dream can be. Coming from all-American melting-pot roots, he has experienced every aspect of what that means: frequently an outsider because of his mixed race, blended into a step-family, reared through lean times by a working-class grandmother who sacrificed much for his education and his future.
Graduating from Harvard, he put his Magna Cum Laude law degree to work, not at some ritzy law firm creating loopholes for the rich, but in the low-income community on the South Side of Chicago. And he wasn't there handing out welfare checks. He was teaching people how to access their legal rights from the political machine, stand up for themselves, and work within the system to create better schools, safety, and justice in their communities. All skills we desperately need on a national, not to mention international, scale right about now.
Despite the best (or should I say worst) efforts of the opposition, voters responded to Obama, the man, as well as the message. Americans deserve to be proud that John McCain's Hate Talk Express was derailed at the polls. To his eternal credit, the graciousness of McCain's speech to his supporters Tuesday night was a marvelous thing to behold, congratulating Obama with straightforward sincerity and looking forward to the hard work of the future. If more of this McCain had been evident on the campaign trail, this election might have been a lot closer. (Forgive me for mangling Shakespeare, but nothing in his campaign so became him like the leaving of it.)
However, the difference between these two campaigns was revealed yet again during the candidates' post-election speeches to their supporters. Speaking to an estimated million people in Chicago's Grant Park, Obama thanked McCain for his congratulations, and saluted him as a worthy opponent. A million people cheered. Addressing his faithful in Phoenix, McCain congratulated Obama and saluted him as a worthy opponent. The crowd booed.
McCain himself seemed genuinely surprised, event upset, by the booing. But this is what happens when you unleash the politics of hate (or allow them to be unleashed in your name). It was certainly extremist hate-mongering that sold the vile Proposition 8 to a gullible populace. Raising the specter of "teaching gay marriage" to helpless, doe-eyed kindergartners—not only untrue, but completely irrelevant—convinced California voters, in their infinite wisdom, to abolish basic human rights guaranteed by the California Supreme Court. We live in a fractious era of war, disease, poverty, hunger, economic collapse, potential global disaster: isn't there some better way to spend $70 million than to punish people who love each other?
Imagine all the disgruntled McCain supporters out there as we speak who believed the lies of the opposition's smear campaign and are now fretting that the country is being handed over to a godless terrorist Muslim Marxist Socialist. Overcoming these ruinously divisive fear tactics to move the country forward will be one of Obama's biggest challenges.
Obama never resorted to smears in his campaign; there was no attempted swift-boating of McCain's war record, no attempts to link McCain to, say, Charles Manson, Hannibal Lecter, or Satan. The most incendiary thing Obama's ads ever said about McCain was the truth: that McCain voted in support of the policies of George W. Bush an overwhelming percentage of the time over the last eight years. (And where McCain differed from Bush, as on the issue of torture, Obama himself was quick to point it out.)
This election was very much a sound and decisive trouncing of the politics of George W. Bush. But simply not being Bush won't be enough. It's going to take extraordinary leadership to reach out across the great cultural divide so relentlessly hacked out between us during the last eight years (hell, since the Reagan era) and pull this country back together. It would take no less than a Superman to fix everything that's broken in this country over the next four (or eight) brief years. But Barack Obama seems to have the right stuff to start. We all know it's going to be a long, hard slog, but the reward—if we get it right—will be truth, justice, and the American way.
The future starts now. Let's get to work.
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