For the folks who weren’t still wildly celebrating, I’m sure yesterday was like coming off a three-day bender. For most of us it was just another day.
See, the thing is that almost nothing’s really changed yet. All we have is the potential for change. Where we really are is in a supremely dangerous time when Dubya is going to do his damndest to codify into law via executive order as many perks and privileges, environmental degradations and civil rights violations as his lamest of lame duck status will allow him to codify. Pushing through regulations is what outgoing administrations do but unfortunately for us, and the rest of the world, with Bush it’s going to be like the frat boys trashing the apartment before they move out after graduation.
And while all the talking heads and columnists are prattling about how this is the start of a new era, about how politics as usual no longer exists, they are busy setting, whether they know it or not, new standards for how the coming presidency is going to be covered. Take this excerpt from a column in yesterday’s New York Times:
And it occurred to me that Obama’s core conviction about the American saga — his belief in the connectedness of all Americans — stemmed from his own unlikely experience of American transformation.
A Kenyan father passing briefly through these shores; a chance encounter with a young Kansan woman; a biracial boy handed off here and there but fortunate at least in the accident of Hawaiian birth.
Obama has spoken without cease about his conviction of American possibility born from this experience. He intuited that, after years of the debasement of so many core American ideas, a case for what the preamble to the U.S. Constitution calls “a more perfect union” would resonate.
He was rarely explicit about race, although he spoke of slavery as America’s “original sin.” He did not need to be. At a time of national soul-searching, what could better symbolize a “more perfect union” and the overcoming of the wounds of that original sin than the election to the White House of an African-American?
– “Perfecting the Union“, Roger Cohen, The New York Times, November 5, 2008
I hate to be a real drag but doesn’t concentrating on Obama’s race rather than on his stellar achievement – overcoming the politics of hate and divisiveness, concentrating on hope and possibility rather than on fear and contraction with the idea that Americans can live up to our centuries’ long PR – undercut the idea that “we’re all connected as a people?”
Or, to put it another way, could Obama have won using the same campaign with exactly the same speeches in exactly the same places if he were a white guy or did he need that extra bit of I-embody-my-principles to put him over the top?
Try not to throw bricks.
Make no mistake: this isn’t a question about whether or not he’s a token or a novelty; he wasn’t elected because he’s black nor was he elected in spite of it I think. Given that almost every pundit and political scholar will be studying this campaign, its framing and its policies, contrasting it with McCain’s scattershot tactics that sometimes modeled traditional campaigning and oftentimes slid into Bush-like smear tactics, it’s a valid intellectual and political communications question. I ask because other than his speech in Philly during the primaries I never heard the man explicitly use his race as justification. There’s never been any Jesse Jackson-like reference to the struggles of his people nor has there ever been any Al Sharpton-like pandering. Obama seems to take his race as a matter of fact; he is what he is and because of it he has had to struggle, yes, but those struggles have given him a unique perspective on his country and its people. So how much of his race was a factor in our perception rather than his presentation?
But given how CNN and other networks have been covering the aftermath – interviewing just black people as if this isn’t a significant day for every American and asking those individuals to sum up the thoughts of the entire black community; constantly referring to Obama as “the first black president” (which he both is and is not until he is actually sworn in) in such a way that implies that every single question that faces his administration will be prefaced either literally by “How will America’s first black president handle [crisis du jour here]?” or by the unspoken question “would he be handling this differently if he were white?” – why does it seem like it won’t be possible for us to treat Obama’s race the way he treats it, as a matter of fact rather than of curiosity?
One thing I’m waiting to see that won’t be available for days, possibly even weeks, is the true numbers on voter turnout. Pundits…OK, Keith Olberman and crew…pontificated Tuesday night that in order to win Obama’s political machine would have to turn out 80% of the registered democrats in the U.S. So, if race was such a big factor in this election why is it that DC, one of America’s top-five blackest cities and a city that has never in its history voted Republican, only had 53.44% voter turnout on election day?
Maybe one of the things we need to consider in this new era is feeding the mainstream media a giant quaalude so they simmer the hell down and stop taking every shred of information and pumping it full of gas to fill air time.
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