Another great depression. An unpopular war and the lamest-of-ducks incumbent. A tone-deaf opponent and his cartoonish running mate. These are the factors that have conspired to bring America to consider electing, as President, a black man with two Ivy League degrees, white grandparents, and nary a trace of the slaver’s whip on his eloquent psyche.
It is a scary time. A giddy time. And still…
Barack Obama never mentions poor people.
He rarely shows any colored people in his many, many, many television campaign ads.
He may have inspired the most broadly-based campaign participation in U.S. history. But in the process, he has also probably destroyed the hope for meaningful campaign finance reform for at least a generation.
He denounced the invasion of Iraq early as unwise, but he has never conceded that it was illegal and immoral, and he continues to bare his fangs at Afghanistan and Iran.
He quickly abandoned his long-held resistance to domestic oil drilling in his haste to create a popular, all-encompassing energy policy. He offers a “universal” health-care plan (“national” would sound too much like socialism) that, like Hillary Clinton’s from the early ‘90s, aims to appease big insurance companies.
There is so much he has not promised. There is so much he has promised that, in black and white, looks like standard Democrat stuff, somewhere between Ted Kennedy and (Either) Clinton.
So where’s the big change?
It’s in his kiss, as an old record once claimed. It’s in the razor-sharp cut of his shoulders and the lanky, I-got-this stride. It’s in the calm thoughtfulness of his answers and the thrill of his soaring yes-we-can.
Most white people, I imagine, have never seen anything like this before, the closest being Sidney Poitier in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? (at the White House?). Obama looks and sounds like a different kind of cat, and that—more than any specific policy position—is what imbues him with the aura of change. Only a black public figure, like Martin Luther King, or Obama) can speak persuasively of unity in this country, because only then can such a promise approach inclusiveness and at the same time carry the promise of forgiveness.
Electing Barack Obaama will not end racism, and it will not activate a progressive political agenda. Yet if that is what it takes to overthrow the reign of the radical right and restore the country to a baseline of sanity, it is the only choice.
Delphine Davis
