America Wins

San Jose, Costa Rica
 

November 6, 2008

A day and a half later, I am still walking dazed, uncertain how to re-start the thinking process about America and its place in the world and where I fit in personally with respect to my nation, my homeland, and my responsibilities toward her.  There is simply no precedent against which to compare the moment.  Back in Costa Rica, the curiosity and mystery here is palpable.  Hotel clerks and waiters look at me as if they want to talk about the historic results.  Taxi drivers cannot contain their curiosity and spark up conversations, many of them assuming wrongly that I probably favored the loser.  Irrespective of any effort to find the closest possible comparator or analogy from the American experience, the election of Barack Obama to the nation's highest office is clearly a transcendental milestone in American history.  So many have been calling it the end of one era and the beginning of another that my similar thoughts run the risk of mingling with the least common denominator of today's opinion to represent a kind of tired and uninspired cliché--about the last thing I would want.  Yet, I cannot rest until I put voice to my personal approbation of this moment and to reach for an understanding of what it means.   

That I am privileged to live through the time and to share the hope leaves me stunned and deeply humbled.  The landslide of change that Barack Obama unleashed in a hungry homeland through hard work and good organization is a mandate to govern that has no historic parallel.  Many were the voices that spoke of a Bradley Effect, and to a person Democrats around the nation were unbelieving, distrustful that it could be possible to actually win an election so many believed to be so desperately vital.  Yet, all the harbingers of gloom and doom were muted by the roar of the American people on November 4th.  As African-American leaders openly wept and throngs of common supporters filled streets around the nation in rapturous wonder, America took a giant step forward.  Around the world global citizens exhaled with relief, from stalwart allies in Europe, to declared antagonists in Iran and the broader Middle East, to countries whose allegiance and solidarity varies according to the times, places like Indonesia, Brazil, India, and of course through sub-Saharan Africa.

Perhaps never before has a single man embodied the hopes and aspirations of so many people in so many walks of life at the same time.  In fact, in all fairness, it is almost certain that the enormity of these expectations will translate to disappointment and disaffection as the honeymoon passes and people from around the nation and the globe will expect change that is actually beyond our new changeling to bring about without upsetting the apple cart and sundering the momentary unity of our nation, which in spite of our years of division and disagreement, is for the moment legerdemain.  You would have to look back to the day after 911 to see a comparable unity of national expectations and such a broad upwelling of international goodwill toward the United States of America.  In those days, American leadership squandered that international goodwill and cleaved domestic unity to propel upon the world stage a kind of anti-America that roared and bellowed and breathed fire and charged at perceived opponents not unlike a giant powerful bull riled to the point of careless rage by an effete picador emerging from the shadows to plant darts into America's back before retreating behind the ironic facade of contemporary globalism and the anonymity of the planetary citizen.

As the candidates exhale in relief and political correspondents put in requests for vacation time, as the transition team brews coffee and pinches itself, as America relaxes at the bowstring's return to a steady-state equilibrium and the harmonics collide to leave a great pregnant vacuum, as the planet pauses in a moment of satiated relief and extraterrestrials send inter-galactic reports back to their home planets regarding the relevance of the event in the context of humanity's potential endurance as planetary stewards, Tuesday's vote was not just the election of an American president but a sea-change in American society and values that will leave its apposite mark in a manner antithetical to and opposite from the effect left by America's war in Iraq and its ambiguously defined and poorly executed global war on terror.  The election of Barack Obama to America's highest office is no mere return of a blighted national party from the wilderness.  His election is not simply the absolute erasure of the nation's racial divide.  His election does not merely restore a liberalistic luster burnished by the lions of his party, Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy . . .  His election does no single one of those things but all at the same time.  And in their simultaneity the ascendant fusion is much like the mixture of gin and vermouth, something greater than the sum of the parts, a third and indivisible essence, a new paradigm indescribable in the phonetics and literary constraints of the existing American language.

We Americans have once again donned the mantle of planetary example, and in so doing have defined our aspirations as well as our responsibilities, and we have lain them like an endless banquet before a hungering planet.  Let us now be careful with the magnitude of our expectations and the timbre of our voices insisting on this change for which we have voted.  The opponents in this election warned the American people that Obama would take this nation in a leftward jag, and as leery as I am personally of such inflammatory terms as "socialist" and "liberal," the truth is that this nation is long overdue for a correction away from the excesses of conservative over-reach and fiduciary irresponsibility spearheaded by Bush's tax cuts, expansion of government, launching of two wars on credit, and the progressive deregulation of markets, environmental protections, and our nation's social compact.  It would appear that not all regulation is spawned by Satan and that arguably the United States requires a bit of oversight to keep its mercantile titans from over-indulging in George Bush's famous metaphorical punch bowl.  But well beyond America's economic shift to the left, America is also long overdue for a major dose of social equality, which America has just channeled by overwhelmingly electing a black man to its highest office.  In many regards, the election result itself is the heraldic peal of the bells of social justice.  Beyond the economic and social sphere, there is one vital and abiding task left to the president elect.  He (and we) must restore America's credibility overseas, and this last mandate, arguably less important to many Americans than the first two, is certainly vital to the many of us that have chosen to represent our nation abroad as American expatriates.

The change that has arrived in America and the world is sufficiently variegated that it will take analysts, pundits, and competing visions of America months to sort out the mechanisms and the priorities and the means to achieve ends that are certainly not fixed in stone.  What America did on Tuesday was to signal that we do not walk in lockstep with jingoistic demands upon our societal decency and national soul.  As a people we have had our innocence stripped roughly away by our sworn enemies and opportunistic adversaries.  As a society we have squabbled with each other over the direction of our nation like the two competing mothers tugging before King Solomon over their claims to the same infant.  In the aftermath of an historic election, competing visions must forge consensus and dispatch to the briar patch the newly outmoded adversarial model of government.

Whatever the steps forward and backward as we sidle along our path through the dawn of a newly revitalized and relevant nation, it will be helpful for all Americans to put aside partisan rancor and to bolster and support the groundswell of change that is upon us.  All walks will be vital in the national parade toward our future.  The echo of all American voices must resound in the chambers of government as the national dialog moves away from the possibility of change to the reality of the form it shall take.  We now need our nation's institutions to be at the peak of their motivational prowess, both for the progress of change and for the restraint of excess.  However challenging the national debate, however heated the domestic rhetoric, however reactionary the forces of retrocession and incendiary the beacons of forward motion, the winner of this presidential contest is not Barack Obama, and it is not African Americans, the downtrodden, the intelligentsia, the middle class, nor secular progressivism.  The winner in Tuesday's election was America.

As we pinch ourselves and wonder at how we can go back to our day-to-day lives under this new paradigm impossible yet to grasp, let us all, rich and poor, eastern and western, northern and southern, urban and rural, self-employed and nine-to-five, military and civilian, government and private-sector, secular and clerical, Republican, Democrat, Green, Libertarian, and Independent, let us all now do what we as a nation do at moments like this.

Let us now Hail to the Chief.

This is an editorial.  This is only an editorial.  Had this been an actual fact you would have been advised to withdraw to your nearest fact shelter to await further instructions.  We repeat.  This is only an editorial.  If you wish to add your own two cents to this debate, you may mail me here.

EDITORIAL HOME