‘We as a people…’

Beforehand, I’d contemplated jumping into my car and cruising up and down Main Street honking my horn in ecstatic jubilation when the results were finally announced—but at 11:00 p.m. on election night, when the west coast polls closed and the networks called the election for Barack Obama, that wasn’t the kind of emotion that I felt. Rather, I basked in a quiet glow of satisfaction and relief.

Obama’s victory, you see, was not a culmination. Like the Democratic Congressional resurgence in 2006, it is only a beginning, the opening of possibilities, noteworthy for what it avoided as much as for what it accomplished. After all, a failure to issue a stinging rebuke to the Republicans for their criminal malfeasance while occupying the White House would have sent this country sliding even faster down the slope and over the cliff’s edge into a freefall decline of both our prosperity and our democracy. Obama’s election merely stops, or perhaps only slows, that descent… and now we face the task of clambering back up that slope.

I think that Obama realizes this. I am sure I am not the only person who sat up straight in his chair when, in his Grant Park speech that evening, he sounded a note reminiscent of Martin Luther King: “The road ahead will be long. Our climb will be steep. We may not get there in one year or even one term, but America—I have never been more hopeful than I am tonight that we will get there. I promise you, we as a people will get there.” The phrase “we as a people” in particular leaps out to anyone familiar with the closing words of King’s last sermon: “But I want you to know tonight, that we as a people will get to the promised land… ”

King, of course, was referring to African Americans; Obama broadens King’s vision to include all Americans—and that is an audacious hope indeed.

To accomplish this, Obama must first avoid what I call “George Bush’s original sin.” Bush came into office in 2001 facing an evenly divided electorate, and rather than following that guidance and governing from the center like the “uniter” he proclaimed himself to be, he and his cronies did everything they could to drag the country kicking and screaming far to the right. As a result, he set us Americans against each other to a degree perhaps not seen since the Civil War itself—and now, we can see the terrible price that he and his regime (and indeed, the whole country, and the entire planet) have paid as a consequence of their hubris and arrogance.

Obama’s margin in the popular vote was better than Bush’s, of course, and his electoral margin was inarguable, but still, he will have to firmly establish himself in the center and reach out to both conservatives and progressives in formulating his policies and charting his course for the future. In these first few days of the transition, I am more concerned, in fact, about the likelihood of his hearing, and heeding, progressive viewpoints than I am about his paying attention to the centrist and conservative voices of the status quo. We who are concerned with issues of peace and economic justice will actually have to speak even louder than we have so far, and rather than considering Obama’s election a “mission accomplished,” we have to see it as a window of opportunity, a small and fleeting opening for effecting real change in the American body politic.

We also must regard it as an opportunity for opening and expanding our local dialogue. Many of our fellow citizens have been thoroughly traumatized, even terrified by the smear campaign conducted against Obama by the right-wing media. Now is the time to encourage more conversation and exchange of ideas—and to make the phrase “we as a people” actually mean something.

- Skip Mendler