Comes a moment …

November 3rd, 2008

… of turning, scarce as hen’s teeth. A rarity. An era-buster. Comes a perfect storm of circumstance buoyed by astrological transits and sociopolitical movements and heart-yearnings. And so it is, now. Look around you today — this is what democracy looks like!

You’ll need nosh and wine … or burritos and margies … or whatever floats your boat tomorrow night — just bypass the Kool Aid. Let’s gather up some resources to keep handy in the next days: here’s one to bookmark — an interactive map, poll closings, yadda. There’s more here. Remember — keep an eye on Virginia and Florida, both in the blue column now; they will likely report first and give us the tone of this election.

And in the unlikely event that you’re still undecided, here’s a sharp little film clip to review your options.

This will be the largest turnout in decades, evidenced by early voting totals and day-long waits to vote. That doesn’t factor in absentee votes, unusually large this year. High turnout on voting day looks to swamp the available supplies and suspect machinery. Again — we may not know anything until Wednesday morning. Add the legal stuff, and we may not know for quite awhile.

The polls reflect an Obama win — but we’re twisting up with nervous energy and holding our breath, aren’t we? It says something disturbing about our times that with anywhere from a 7 - 13 point lead, and every Sunday pundit projecting his win, Barack Obama is still policing his ground team to keep pushing and not get too confident. Sad commentary that while most of us want to soar, we’re fettered by the ball and chain of repressive politics and the dark thought-forms of an erratic and played-out Republican electorate.

The Pub disinformation campaign has done its work; you’ll find an illustration here of the near hysteria of the moment. While I cringed watching it, it’s mild compared with what will come next. You can sense what’s just below the surface of this conversation, waiting to explode.

Compare it to this Christian Science Monitor article: My wife made me canvass for Obama; here’s what I learned. So many of us are ready to reach for one another’s hands, not wave our fists in the air. Time will tell how much of each we will see next.

In this extraordinary moment, we don’t know what happens next — and, truthfully, we’re not entirely sure what we’re feeling, either. You can’t really anticipate a moment like this, a perfect storm of energies that come together like a laser light to pinpoint a turning — you have to enter it and ride the wave.

Reality is making a comeback but it has to peel back layers of poli-crud and fear and self-righteousness and Christocratic nihilism to poke its head up into the light. The dark got too dark there, for awhile … and we’re not sure how quickly light can come flooding in, how it will … if it will. Andrew Sullivan writes an excellent article in the Times UK speaking to that question. He ends it with his signature sign-off: know hope. I’m with him.

The reads today play “what if …” That’s what we’re all playing today, isn’t it?

By the way, an authentic American icon died this weekend; Studs Terkel. RIP.

Hang ten, Wavers — and [a Jude sign-off] keep hope!

Obama leads McCain in 6 of 8 key states
Reuters
Mon Nov 3, 2008

Onslaught of dirty tricks as election day nears
In the final hours of the campaign, bogus fliers, e-mails and calls increase
Heather Clark / AP
Sun., Nov. 2, 2008

In the hours before Election Day, as inevitable as winter, comes an onslaught of dirty tricks — confusing e-mails, disturbing phone calls and insinuating fliers left on doorsteps during the night.

The intent, almost always, is to keep folks from voting or to confuse them, usually through intimidation or misinformation. But in this presidential race, in which a black man leads most polls, some of the deceit has a decidedly racist bent.

Complaints have surfaced in predominantly African-American neighborhoods of Philadelphia where fliers have circulated, warning voters they could be arrested at the polls if they had unpaid parking tickets or if they had criminal convictions.

Over the weekend in Virginia, bogus fliers with an authentic-looking commonwealth seal said fears of high voter turnout had prompted election officials to hold two elections — one on Tuesday for Republicans and another on Wednesday for Democrats.

In New Mexico, two Hispanic women filed a lawsuit last week claiming they were harassed by a private investigator working for a Republican lawyer who came to their homes and threatened to call immigration authorities, even though they are U.S. citizens.

“He was questioning her status, saying that he needed to see her papers and documents to show that she was a U.S. citizen and was a legitimate voter,” said Guadalupe Bojorquez, speaking on behalf of her mother, Dora Escobedo, a 67-year-old Albuquerque resident who speaks only Spanish. “He totally, totally scared the heck out of her.”

In Pennsylvania, e-mails appeared linking Democrat Barack Obama to the Holocaust. “Jewish Americans cannot afford to make the wrong decision on Tuesday, Nov. 4,” said the electronic message, paid for by an entity calling itself the Republican Federal Committee. “Many of our ancestors ignored the warning signs in the 1930s and 1940s and made a tragic mistake.”

Voter suppression efforts

Laughlin McDonald, who leads the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, said he has never seen “an election where there was more interest and more voter turnout, and more efforts to suppress registration and turnout. And that has a real impact on minorities.”

The Obama campaign and civil rights advocacy groups have signed up millions of new voters for this presidential race. In Ohio alone, some 600,000 have submitted new voter registration cards.

Across the country, many of these first-time voters are young and strong Obama supporters. Many are also black and Hispanic. ++

Tomorrow
William Rivers Pitt, TruthOut
11/03/08

The Republican Rump
PAUL KRUGMAN, NYT
November 3, 2008

Maybe the polls are wrong, and John McCain is about to pull off the biggest election upset in American history. But right now the Democrats seem poised both to win the White House and to greatly expand their majorities in both houses of Congress.

Most of the post-election discussion will presumably be about what the Democrats should and will do with their mandate. But let me ask a different question that will also be important for the nation’s future: What will defeat do to the Republicans?

You might think, perhaps hope, that Republicans will engage in some soul-searching, that they’ll ask themselves whether and how they lost touch with the national mainstream. But my prediction is that this won’t happen any time soon.

Instead, the Republican rump, the party that’s left after the election, will be the party that attends Sarah Palin’s rallies, where crowds chant “Vote McCain, not Hussein!” It will be the party of Saxby Chambliss, the senator from Georgia, who, observing large-scale early voting by African-Americans, warns his supporters that “the other folks are voting.” It will be the party that harbors menacing fantasies about Barack Obama’s Marxist — or was that Islamic? — roots.

Why will the G.O.P. become more, not less, extreme? For one thing, projections suggest that this election will drive many of the remaining Republican moderates out of Congress, while leaving the hard right in place.

For example, Larry Sabato, the election forecaster, predicts that seven Senate seats currently held by Republicans will go Democratic on Tuesday. According to the liberal-conservative rankings of the political scientists Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal, five of the soon-to-be-gone senators are more moderate than the median Republican senator — so the rump, the G.O.P. caucus that remains, will have shifted further to the right. The same thing seems set to happen in the House.

Also, the Republican base already seems to be gearing up to regard defeat not as a verdict on conservative policies, but as the result of an evil conspiracy. A recent Democracy Corps poll found that Republicans, by a margin of more than two to one, believe that Mr. McCain is losing “because the mainstream media is biased” rather than “because Americans are tired of George Bush.”

And Mr. McCain has laid the groundwork for feverish claims that the election was stolen, declaring that the community activist group Acorn — which, as Factcheck.org points out, has never “been found guilty of, or even charged with” causing fraudulent votes to be cast — “is now on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy.” Needless to say, the potential voters Acorn tries to register are disproportionately “other folks,” as Mr. Chambliss might put it.

Anyway, the Republican base, egged on by the McCain-Palin campaign, thinks that elections should reflect the views of “real Americans” — and most of the people reading this column probably don’t qualify.

Thus, in the face of polls suggesting that Mr. Obama will win Virginia, a top McCain aide declared that the “real Virginia” — the southern part of the state, excluding the Washington, D.C., suburbs — favors Mr. McCain. A majority of Americans now live in big metropolitan areas, but while visiting a small town in North Carolina, Ms. Palin described it as “what I call the real America,” one of the “pro-America” parts of the nation. The real America, it seems, is small-town, mainly southern and, above all, white.

I’m not saying that the G.O.P. is about to become irrelevant. Republicans will still be in a position to block some Democratic initiatives, especially if the Democrats fail to achieve a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.

And that blocking ability will ensure that the G.O.P. continues to receive plenty of corporate dollars: this year the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has poured money into the campaigns of Senate Republicans like Minnesota’s Norm Coleman, precisely in the hope of denying Democrats a majority large enough to pass pro-labor legislation.

But the G.O.P.’s long transformation into the party of the unreasonable right, a haven for racists and reactionaries, seems likely to accelerate as a result of the impending defeat.

This will pose a dilemma for moderate conservatives. Many of them spent the Bush years in denial, closing their eyes to the administration’s dishonesty and contempt for the rule of law. Some of them have tried to maintain that denial through this year’s election season, even as the McCain-Palin campaign’s tactics have grown ever uglier. But one of these days they’re going to have to realize that the G.O.P. has become the party of intolerance. ++

If Obama Loses, Who Gets Blamed?
His loss would be disastrous for the media and political establishment.
John Dickerson, Slate
Sunday, Nov. 2, 2008

CLEVELAND—If Barack Obama wins the election, it will be historic. And if he loses, it will be pretty historic, too: It would mark the biggest collective error in the history of the media and political establishment.

Barack ObamaAn Obama loss would mean the majority of pundits, reporters and analysts were wrong. Pollsters would have to find a new line of work, since Obama has been ahead in all 159 polls taken in the last six weeks. The massive crowds that have regularly turned out to see Obama would turn out to have meant nothing. This collective failure of elites would provide such a blast of schadenfreude that Republicans like Rush Limbaugh would be struck speechless (another historic first).

This situation lends a feeling of unreality to the proceedings as we begin to measure the time until Election Day in hours. It is the elephant on the campaign plane. No one is letting on. Journalists aren’t supposed to. Plus, we’ve been wrong so often, and politics can be so unpredictable, it would be dumb to say that Obama is going to win big.

John McCain is still running hard, and Obama isn’t doing any premature celebrating. Members of his staff are on a hair-trigger for any stories that might suggest he or they are displaying overconfidence. Aides said Obama was reacting to the apparent good news with trademark equilibrium though they did say he was happy to be at the end of his journey. “He’s exhilarated,” said David Axelrod. “He smells the finish line.”

Despite Obama’s even keel, there are a few small signs that suggest Obama is feeling good. He’s flashing that magazine-cover smile, the one that takes over his face, a little more often. On the stump, where he’s given nearly the exact same speech for a week, he’s started to show some of the looseness of his earlier campaign. “Don’t be hoodwinked,” he said of McCain’s claims, a standard line, to which he added a less regular filigree: “Don’t be bamboozled, don’t fall for the okey-doke.”

In Columbus, Obama even gave a shout-out to McCain. Talking about the need to improve the political discourse, he said that also included the need for more humor. “John McCain was funny yesterday on Saturday Night Live,” he said. “I didn’t see it last night but I saw it on YouTube. That’s what our politics should be about, the ability to laugh at ourselves.”

Obama has had the most fun with Dick Cheney, who recently said he was “delighted” to endorse John McCain. “You’ve never seen Dick Cheney delighted, but he is,” Obama told a crowd here, chucking to himself. “It’s kinda hard to picture, but it’s true.” He went on to congratulate McCain. “He had to work hard for it!” The rain started pouring in the middle of his Cheney routine, but Obama didn’t miss a beat. “Did you notice that it all started when I started talking about Dick Cheney? We’ve been through a nation of storms but sunshine is on the way.”

In Cleveland, Bruce Springsteen opened for Obama. When he was finished, the Obama family joined him, and Springsteen brought up his wife Patty Scialfa and their three kids. Suddenly it was like we were all in the vestibule of a holiday party as The One and The Boss implored their children to step forward and shake the hands.

When the rally in Cleveland concluded, Obama was drenched but lingered for a moment in front of the crowd, estimated at 80,000, and did a few tiny little dance steps to “Signed, Sealed, Delivered, I’m Yours,” the Stevie Wonder song that plays after each rally the minute he stops speaking.

It’s hard to guess at a candidate’s inner feelings. It is particularly hard with Obama, whose emotions are as carefully constrained as a Bonsai tree and who keeps the press at a chilly distance. It could be that Obama is just happy to be with his family.

Since Saturday, Obama’s wife Michelle and children, Malia and Sasha, have been with him. The girls are clearly delighted to be in his company. At most stops, Michelle introduces her husband and implores the audience to help her husband finish the quest he started in their name 21 months ago. “I would love to give credit to my husband,” she said, “but this race is not about him but all of us, all of you. He’s taken us 85 percent of the way. The rest is on us.”

Obama told the crowd in Cleveland that the family time is shaping his mood. “The last few days I’ve been feeling good,” he said. “You start thinking that maybe we might win an election November 4.”

Great: Now another American institution could be in peril: If Obama loses, we may have reason to doubt the power of family, too. ++

Obama: I am the chosen one
Untried, untested but ready, Obama dares the US to vote him in
Andrew Sullivan, The Sunday Times UK
November 2, 2008

Nobody knows will happen on Tuesday, but there is a clear chance that one of the unlikeliest events in American political history could take place. A miscegenated black man could become president of the United States. And if the polls are accurate, the state of Virginia will be critical in any Democratic victory.

This state has not voted for a Democrat since 1964 but now gives Barack Obama a lead of about six points. That is remarkable from the perspective of the past few decades – but much more staggering when you take a longer view.

Virginia contains Richmond, once the capital of the Confederate slave states. As recently as 1961, when Obama was born, Virginia would have ruled his parents’ marriage illegal, because it was inter-racial. In fact, it was not until Obama was six that Obama’s parents’ marriage would have been made legal in that state, and Obama ceased being illegitimate. And that happened only because the US Supreme Court forced it. That is how far Virginia and America have come in Obama’s lifetime – and ours.

It would be easy to rhapsodise too sentimentally about this – but just as easy to understate its momentousness. I do not believe Americans or anyone else in the world will fully absorb it until it happens.

America, after all, was founded on one principle, freedom, but permeated by another, slavery. Slavery was America’s original sin and Obama is the fruit of its slow and painful self-absolution. The civil war over the question was immensely bloody – far bloodier per capita than any other war in American history.

The victory of the north led to intense resistance in the defeated south for a century of segregation and cruelty – and still divides the country to this day.

In fact if you place a map of the states that favoured the proslavery south over a map of the states that are now showing a trend for John McCain, you will get an almost perfect match. The only differences: Virginia has switched sides, and West Virginia has too. (It is now for McCain.) Florida, once part of the Confederacy, is also now prone to vote Democrat because of a massive influx from the north.

The rest is essentially unchanged since the 1860s. Even in America, the past controls the present.

Obama – for extra historic piquancy – is from Illinois and began his campaign in Springfield, where Abraham Lincoln started his. Like Lincoln, Obama is trained in the law, came from a humble background, and is aiming for the presidency with almost no executive experience.

People forget how inexperienced Lincoln was when he took office after one of the worst presidencies in American history – James Buchanan’s. Lincoln had held no legislative or executive office and had been a congressman for only two years previously. He became a national star primarily because of his oratory. Sound familiar?

Lincoln’s task is Obama’s: to unite a deeply fractured country. Lincoln’s challenges were far greater, but if Obama wins on Tuesday he will still face an immense set of challenges.

The United States is in two gruelling wars thousands of miles away, neither of which appears to be approaching anything that could be called “victory”.

In a mere eight years President George W Bush has doubled the national debt he inherited and turned a federal surplus into a half-a-trillion deficit.

Bush’s Republicans have also added a cool $32 trillion to future government liabilities and kept taxes unsustainably low unless entitlements are slashed in a manner no politician would contemplate. America’s real economy is in a recession and its financial stability is in doubt. Economic inequality has soared and cultural polarisation has intensified. The crisis America finds itself in is reminiscent of 1980, and perhaps 1932. Whoever inherits Bush’s awful legacy will have his work cut out.

A President Obama would start with the task that bedevilled his two predecessors. America remains deeply riven and the past president exacerbated those divides to keep himself in power.

You can see the fruits of that policy everywhere in the McCain campaign. The hardest core of McCain’s supporters seem not just to oppose Obama but to regard him as inherently illegitimate. They see him as at best a socialist and at worst a traitor. A clear minority refuses to believe he is a Christian and many believe he is not merely Muslim but allied with Islamist terror.

McCain and Sarah Palin, desperate to find an argument to wrest themselves out of their polling deficit, have deliberately and clearly legitimised this line of attack. Palin has said that Obama has been “palling around with terrorists”. A McCain spokesman last week said on cable televi-sion that Obama was a friend of antisemites. The now-famous “Joe the Plumber” has said that an Obama presidency would mean “death to Israel”. The paranoid strain in American politics, long present, has made Obama’s task of uniting the country if he is elected that much harder.

Indeed, there are many signs that if Obama wins, the strategy of the Republican right will be to treat him as potentially treasonous until proven otherwise. Any outreach Obama might make to, say, elements in the Iranian regime will not be interpreted as hardheaded diplomacy, but as proof that Obama is in covert league with America’s enemies. Any withdrawal from Iraq could lead to a “stab-in-the-back” narrative that blames treacherous leftist elites for waving “the white flag of surrender” and betraying good American soldiers.

Many on the far right have advanced themes that suggest that the election is being stolen by Democrats and their allies by fraudulently registering black and Hispanic voters. McCain himself asserted in the final debate that what might be at stake is the biggest voter fraud in the history of American politics – an absurd hyperbole, but one deployed aggressively nonetheless. These are dangerous waters to swim in, but, sadly, the fringes of the far right have come close to defining the Republican party.

If Obama wins big, moreover, he could face bigger challenges than if he wins by a conventional margin. The devastated congressional right will be reduced to those in the safest seats with the most ideological bent. Just like the Tories after 1997, the Republicans could marinate in their own denial before they wake up and move painfully back to the centre.

Already, some are positioning Palin to be the standard-bearer for the next wave of Republicanism – a potent combination of populist antielitism and religious zeal. If you consider how the right responded to Bill Clinton’s election in 1992, and then add race to the mix, the prospect for calm ahead is slight.

Equally, too big a Democratic majority in the House and Senate could make Obama vulnerable to left-liberal hubris and conservative Democrat revolt. Few economists recommend fiscal austerity in the current downturn, but there is a risk of empowered Democratic power brokers on Capitol Hill overcompensating and initiating a binge of favoured spending projects in their own constituencies.

Any spending increase by Obama will be reliably greeted by a chorus of “socialism!” from the opposition (an opposition that said almost nothing while Bush increased federal spending by a bigger margin than any president since FDR) and any tax increases in a recession will prompt overwhelming caterwauling as a further drag on the economy.

My bet is that his tax rises will be more modest than advertised. By the time Clin-ton became president, remember, the recession of the early 1990s was almost over. When Obama becomes president, it will just be beginning.

On climate change, the task will be made much harder by that depression – as Obama’s cap-and-trade scheme would indisputably hurt business. On immigration, Obama would easily be able to pass a bill favoured by Bush, but also face a nasty backlash from the right and maybe even in his own party.

Obama may even be leery of his signature healthcare reform, remembering what happened to the Clintons in 1993. And the price of a big majority will be a lot of Democrats in marginal seats in normally Republican states who may well bolt if Obama gets too liberal.

Managing all of this will not be easy. And Obama will also have to deal with Democrat-run congressional committees finally getting a thorough look at what the Bush administration has been up to in the past eight years.

Among the issues that will be impossible to avoid will be evidence of war crimes and torture authorised by the outgoing president and his closest aides. Prosecution? A truth and reconciliation commission on the South African or Chilean models? All we can say with certainty is that these are difficult questions in which maintaining the political centre will be extremely hard.

Equally, if Obama is too cautious and too careful not to divide the country, he could end up squandering his own mandate. He has potential enemies to the left of him as well as the right. If he is elected, he will cap a generation of rising anger and frustration on the Democratic left. From their point of view, the Clintons were semi-Republicans in the 1990s, the 2000 election was stolen and the 2004 election was an artefact of warmongering and religious pandering. They do not just want to win. They want to get even. They have a head of steam that could scald Obama as powerfully in office as it has helped propel him to the verge of the presidency.

There is also an enormous liability for Obama in the great hopes he has inspired. The reason for the wave of optimism behind him – just look at the massive crowds across the country this past year – is almost entirely due to the profound national demoralisation of the recent past. Iraq and Afghanistan, Katrina and the financial meltdown, torture and religious extremism: all these have led many Americans to the brink of despair about their own country. A historically unprecedented number of Americans believe their country is on the wrong track and view Obama as the vehicle to repair it.

Among the most enthusiastic Obama supporters, there are tinges of hero worship and aspirations beyond anything any human being can deliver. And the hostility born of dashed expectations is always the worst. People expecting a messiah will at some point be forced to realise they have merely elected a president.

No president will be able to wave the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan away with some kind of magic wand – there are few good options in either conflict, and many potential perils. No president will be able to end a recession with deep roots or alter market confidence in a single speech.

No president can change the Earth’s climate in four or eight years. And when Obama’s limitations emerge, as they will, there is a danger that the powerful expectations of his young base may turn to tears. This is always the risk with political “movements”. They conjure up utopias that can simply never happen.

Between the roiling and increasingly bitter rapids on the right and the left, can Obama maintain a steady course? We cannot know, of course. But the evidence of the past year is encouraging. What has been truly amazing is the preternatural calm and moderation Obama has shown throughout this volatile and emotional campaign. He has managed to get to the brink of the White House by beating some of the most formidable political machines in America – the Clintons and the Roves – without intensifying the conflict or polarising the country himself.

He seems able to absorb these currents without further disturbing them. Of course, this is much harder in office than in opposition. In office, you have to make decisions that delineate winners and losers rather than make speeches onto which everyone can project their interests. But Obama seems unafraid of his enemies, undeterred by his rivals, and able somehow to stay healthy and cheerful.

His temperamental edge is complemented by his organisational and managerial skills. The most seasoned political observers have been struck by the meticulous professionalism of his campaign; and there has never been a fundraising machine as innovative or as successful as his in the history of American politics.

Moreover, he has put himself out there in the most Republican of Republican states. He looks competitive not only in usually Republican Virginia, but also Ohio, Colorado, Montana, New Mexico, Indiana and even Georgia. In one of the more surre-al moments of last week, it looked as if the Obama campaign was considering a serious last-minute effort in Arizona, McCain’s home state.

My own view is that Obama is a midwest-ern centrist in his gut. He is much more like the Clintons substantively than either he or the Clintons would care to admit. The right’s biggest mistake in this campaign has been to believe that Obama is a closet radical and that if they could expose that, they would win. Although Obama is a product of his generation and of academia, his proximity to the intellectual left does not seem to have affected his policies.

His healthcare plan is less leftist than the Republican Mitt Romney’s in Massachu-setts. His proposals cut taxes for 90% of Americans. His climate change proposals are tediously conventional (too conventional to my mind). His instincts on foreign policy are more George H W Bush than George W Bush, which is to say he’s a pragmatic empiricist. If I were to bet on one appointment that Obama will make to his cabinet, it would be keeping Robert Gates, the defence secretary, at the Pentagon.

He is a strange liberal who seems to get along famously with conservatives. And he has now run up quite a roster of conservative endorsements, from Colin Powell to Francis Fukuyama. This is partly why a historical perspective on Obama does indeed return to the figure of Lincoln and the trau-ma of the 1860s.

In the middle of an unbridgeable divide, Lincoln kept calm. He inherited a much more divided country, of course. Lincoln did not even campaign in most of the southern states – he was not even on the ballot in most of them. By the time he was elected, many of them had already seceded. But Lincoln’s dedication to the cause of abolishing slavery was matched by a moderate demeanour and an extreme aversion to political polarisation.

Lincoln famously staffed his cabinet with what the historian Doris Kearns Good-win has called a “team of rivals”. Think of the way in which Obama handled the Clintons. He gave them just enough rope to hang themselves but managed to avoid a real breach. Last week Obama was jointly campaigning with Bill and comparing his economic proposals to Clinton’s in 1992.

That is a unifying skill Lincoln had and Obama will need. Obama’s capacity to pacify his enemies and organise his friends is his most telling characteristic. It should not be mistaken for softness. There is steel behind the velvet. But the velvet is really smooth and comfy.

Obama will also have something Lincoln never had. He will be in his DNA the visible incarnation of a wound that dates to America’s beginnings. If he is elected president, there will be a healing of some sort deep in the country’s psyche. That act will be a catalyst for unknowable change in America and in America’s role in the world. We can and should focus on his challenges, on the divisions still festering in America, on economic crisis and military quagmires. But what Obama appeals to is what Reagan appealed to: an American optimism that problems can be solved and divisions can be overcome.

In the coming week, if he is elected, we would be wise to resist euphoria or sentiment. But we would be wilfully blind not to sense the gravity and potential of the moment as well. We could have the first black president, with a congressional majority of a size not seen since Lyndon Johnson. We could see a landslide among the young. We could see an unprecedented African-American turnout – a moment when black Americans actively take ownership for the first time of the society in which they have always been such an integral part.

We simply do not know what new realities this moment could unleash. What we do know is that this is history – epic, deep, momentous history.

Let us keep our heads. But let us not numb our hearts. Somewhere in a Burkean idyll, countless Americans who lived before us, the souls of so many black folk and white folk across the centuries, are watching. What would Washington have said? How could Lincoln believe it? How amazed would Martin Luther King be?

We are indeed on the verge of something that seems even more incredible the closer it gets, something more than a mere election. This is America, after all. It is a place that has seen great cruelty and hardship in its time. But it is also a place that yearns to believe naively in mornings rather than evenings, that cherishes dawns over dusks, that is not embarrassed by its own sense of destiny. In this unlikely mixed-race figure of Barack Obama, we will for a brief moment perhaps see a nation reimagined and a world of possibilities open up. For a brief moment at least.

As they have learnt to say in some of the most blighted parts of the world at some of the most desperate times: know hope. ++

“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.” ~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007

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Entry Filed under: Political Waves