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Obama's victory was a triumph not just for Democrats but for the American spirit and the world
By Gary Kamiya
Nov. 5, 2008
Today the embattled American people stood, and fired a shot heard 'round the world.
Only rarely does one know that one is experiencing history while it happens. Barack Obama's victory is one of those occasions. This amazing day marks a decisive change, not just in America's politics but in its soul. It announces the arrival of a new America, of a multitudinous, multihued people whose time has come and who have demanded a politics worthy of them. Their voice echoes across the land from Stone Mountain to Seattle, and its message rings out loud and clear: We have taken our country back.
We have taken it back from the mean-spirited demagogues who were willing to tear the American people apart to stay in power.
We have taken it back from the apostles of selfishness who pretend naked greed is noble individualism.
We have taken it back from the deluded hawks who cavalierly sent our youth off to die in a war that should never have been fought.
We have taken it back from the incompetent officials who lived up to their antigovernment credo by bungling everything they touched.
We have taken it back from the reactionaries whose intolerance, xenophobia and religious zealotry have been encouraged by a distorted Republican Party for far too long.
Some will say that this election didn't prove that much. They will argue that considering Bush's unpopularity, the war and the financial crisis, this race should never have been even competitive. They will say the race was tied in September and only an inept McCain campaign and the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression tilted it toward Obama. They will say that America is still a center-right country.
But those arguments are like dead trees standing in the path of a spring-snow torrent. A great change has come upon America.
Watching Obama speak after his victory, I was reminded again of the subtle and profound depths of this man. It was a subdued speech, on the surface almost disappointing, but its eloquent restraint spoke volumes about not just Obama's character but what we could call, harking back to another age, his taste. He chose not to mount the messianic pulpit, knowing that if he did he would alienate many Americans. Because of his complex and hard-earned comfort with his own racial identity, he is a self-reflective man, a man of many parts.
We have seen his facets. Obama can parry and thrust with Hillary Clinton. He can be hip with Jon Stewart. He can speak eloquently of race, as he did in his victory speech, without foregrounding his own race. He can reach out to those who didn't vote for him, and his native sensitivity makes his words believable. His rhetoric is soaring but never self-aggrandizing: He is too confident in his own identity to need the fix of adulation. A leader with these qualities, a black man whose racial consciousness is so evolved as to be unreadable, has the ability to take America places it has never been before.
The election of Obama marks a change in what it means to be an American. It is a change that is as true to the essence of conservatism as it is to liberalism, for it has its roots in a generous vision of civic life that both share. And all Americans will benefit from it.
The Obama triumph means the Reagan revolution is over. The antigovernment, antitax, trickle-down, every-man-for-himself ethos collapsed with a whimper during the catastrophic presidency of George W. Bush, and Obama's election put it out of its misery. By electing Obama, the American people have emphatically rejected the selfishness, masquerading as freedom and rugged individualism, that has been the calling card of the American right wing since Barry Goldwater. In its place, they are calling not just for a new and expanded vision of government's role in American life but for a new vision of American society.
That vision represents a return to the idea that Americans are bound together by more than just a flag, that we are all part of the same community, and that the strength of a community, like the strength of a family, is measured by its members' commitment to each other. The America envisioned by Obama is one in which the privileged care about the plight of the less fortunate because that care, that solidarity, is an inseparable part of who we are as Americans.
And that solidarity extends beyond our borders, to the people of the world. More than our wealth and power, this is what has made America a beacon of hope across the globe. After 9/11, Bush had an opportunity to reach out to the rest of the world. In his arrogance and folly, he chose to bully it instead. The election of Obama signifies that America is rejoining the world. How telling it was that in his speech, Obama said that America would defeat not our evil terrorist enemies, the rhetoric we have grown used to, but "those who would tear the world down." His is a larger, calmer vision, one that does not play into the hands of terrorists by exaggerating their threat.
One of the many remarkable things about Obama's campaign is that even its slickest, most professional, most Machiavellian messages -- and how marvelous that Democrats should be slicker, more professional, more Machiavellian than Republicans! -- always communicated the man's essential idealism. Obama's 30-minute infomercial is a case in point. That film was essentially the story of three struggling American families. It was crafted to appeal to voters who would relate to those families, and clearly its main purpose was to persuade them to vote for Obama out of self-interest: If Obama helped the families in the film, he could help them, too. But what is noteworthy about the film, and indeed about Obama's entire campaign, is that it assumed that Americans are capable of going beyond self-interest, that what happens to that family in Ohio matters to us.
For a nation starved for inspiration, that implicit call was like water in a desert. For eight years, and for many years before that, Americans have been told that nothing is required of them as citizens except to make and spend money and jump in fear of terrorism when prodded. Those who tried in their personal lives to take steps to alleviate the greatest threat facing the planet, global warming, were derided by Vice President Cheney as practicing "personal virtue." The country was thirsty for more.
And in his speech, Obama asked us to do more. In words that recalled Winston Churchill's famous declaration in the darkest days of WWII that "I have nothing to offer except blood, toil, tears and sweat," he spoke of "remaking this nation the only way it has been done in America for 221 years -- block by block, brick by brick, calloused hand by calloused hand." He called on us to make sacrifices. Above all, he called on us to come together. "So let us summon a new spirit of patriotism, of service and responsibility where each of us resolves to pitch in and work harder and look after not only ourselves, but each other."
His words revealed the gaping fissure in conservatism's moral vision. Conservatives claim to be the upholders of a threatened traditional morality. But their economic ideology is inherently amoral. Their refusal to see American society as a community implicitly rejects both the Christian injunction to "love thy neighbor as thyself," and the oldest moral commandment in the world, the Golden Rule. A party and movement that have rejected the idea that its members should care about their poorer neighbors, or simply denies that the less privileged are our neighbors, is one that has lost its moral compass.
Only rarely does one know that one is experiencing history while it happens. Barack Obama's victory is one of those occasions. This amazing day marks a decisive change, not just in America's politics but in its soul. It announces the arrival of a new America, of a multitudinous, multihued people whose time has come and who have demanded a politics worthy of them. Their voice echoes across the land from Stone Mountain to Seattle, and its message rings out loud and clear: We have taken our country back.
We have taken it back from the mean-spirited demagogues who were willing to tear the American people apart to stay in power.
We have taken it back from the apostles of selfishness who pretend naked greed is noble individualism.
We have taken it back from the deluded hawks who cavalierly sent our youth off to die in a war that should never have been fought.
We have taken it back from the incompetent officials who lived up to their antigovernment credo by bungling everything they touched.
We have taken it back from the reactionaries whose intolerance, xenophobia and religious zealotry have been encouraged by a distorted Republican Party for far too long.
Some will say that this election didn't prove that much. They will argue that considering Bush's unpopularity, the war and the financial crisis, this race should never have been even competitive. They will say the race was tied in September and only an inept McCain campaign and the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression tilted it toward Obama. They will say that America is still a center-right country.
But those arguments are like dead trees standing in the path of a spring-snow torrent. A great change has come upon America.
Watching Obama speak after his victory, I was reminded again of the subtle and profound depths of this man. It was a subdued speech, on the surface almost disappointing, but its eloquent restraint spoke volumes about not just Obama's character but what we could call, harking back to another age, his taste. He chose not to mount the messianic pulpit, knowing that if he did he would alienate many Americans. Because of his complex and hard-earned comfort with his own racial identity, he is a self-reflective man, a man of many parts.
We have seen his facets. Obama can parry and thrust with Hillary Clinton. He can be hip with Jon Stewart. He can speak eloquently of race, as he did in his victory speech, without foregrounding his own race. He can reach out to those who didn't vote for him, and his native sensitivity makes his words believable. His rhetoric is soaring but never self-aggrandizing: He is too confident in his own identity to need the fix of adulation. A leader with these qualities, a black man whose racial consciousness is so evolved as to be unreadable, has the ability to take America places it has never been before.
The election of Obama marks a change in what it means to be an American. It is a change that is as true to the essence of conservatism as it is to liberalism, for it has its roots in a generous vision of civic life that both share. And all Americans will benefit from it.
The Obama triumph means the Reagan revolution is over. The antigovernment, antitax, trickle-down, every-man-for-himself ethos collapsed with a whimper during the catastrophic presidency of George W. Bush, and Obama's election put it out of its misery. By electing Obama, the American people have emphatically rejected the selfishness, masquerading as freedom and rugged individualism, that has been the calling card of the American right wing since Barry Goldwater. In its place, they are calling not just for a new and expanded vision of government's role in American life but for a new vision of American society.
That vision represents a return to the idea that Americans are bound together by more than just a flag, that we are all part of the same community, and that the strength of a community, like the strength of a family, is measured by its members' commitment to each other. The America envisioned by Obama is one in which the privileged care about the plight of the less fortunate because that care, that solidarity, is an inseparable part of who we are as Americans.
And that solidarity extends beyond our borders, to the people of the world. More than our wealth and power, this is what has made America a beacon of hope across the globe. After 9/11, Bush had an opportunity to reach out to the rest of the world. In his arrogance and folly, he chose to bully it instead. The election of Obama signifies that America is rejoining the world. How telling it was that in his speech, Obama said that America would defeat not our evil terrorist enemies, the rhetoric we have grown used to, but "those who would tear the world down." His is a larger, calmer vision, one that does not play into the hands of terrorists by exaggerating their threat.
One of the many remarkable things about Obama's campaign is that even its slickest, most professional, most Machiavellian messages -- and how marvelous that Democrats should be slicker, more professional, more Machiavellian than Republicans! -- always communicated the man's essential idealism. Obama's 30-minute infomercial is a case in point. That film was essentially the story of three struggling American families. It was crafted to appeal to voters who would relate to those families, and clearly its main purpose was to persuade them to vote for Obama out of self-interest: If Obama helped the families in the film, he could help them, too. But what is noteworthy about the film, and indeed about Obama's entire campaign, is that it assumed that Americans are capable of going beyond self-interest, that what happens to that family in Ohio matters to us.
For a nation starved for inspiration, that implicit call was like water in a desert. For eight years, and for many years before that, Americans have been told that nothing is required of them as citizens except to make and spend money and jump in fear of terrorism when prodded. Those who tried in their personal lives to take steps to alleviate the greatest threat facing the planet, global warming, were derided by Vice President Cheney as practicing "personal virtue." The country was thirsty for more.
And in his speech, Obama asked us to do more. In words that recalled Winston Churchill's famous declaration in the darkest days of WWII that "I have nothing to offer except blood, toil, tears and sweat," he spoke of "remaking this nation the only way it has been done in America for 221 years -- block by block, brick by brick, calloused hand by calloused hand." He called on us to make sacrifices. Above all, he called on us to come together. "So let us summon a new spirit of patriotism, of service and responsibility where each of us resolves to pitch in and work harder and look after not only ourselves, but each other."
His words revealed the gaping fissure in conservatism's moral vision. Conservatives claim to be the upholders of a threatened traditional morality. But their economic ideology is inherently amoral. Their refusal to see American society as a community implicitly rejects both the Christian injunction to "love thy neighbor as thyself," and the oldest moral commandment in the world, the Golden Rule. A party and movement that have rejected the idea that its members should care about their poorer neighbors, or simply denies that the less privileged are our neighbors, is one that has lost its moral compass.
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