What Obama's Election Means To Me

I am from Chicago. I grew up in the all-Caucasian cultural wasteland of its western suburbs during the Carter and Reagan years, and always knew I was a Democrat. During the Reagan years, I worried like hell about nuclear war, (listening to Frankie Goes To Hollywood's Two Tribes, check out the ending), noticed Reagan never mentioned AIDS, campaigned against (fictional) black welfare queens, and attacked Carter's deficits but ran up far worse ones of his own. People said he meant well. My high school was segregated by virtue of where it was. No blacks, essentially no Jews or Latinos. Among 3000 people. I supported Mondale, when my home county went 75/25 for Reagan, then Dukakis in college. After seeing Dukakis run the most passive campaign of the modern era, blowing a huge lead while sitting in Massachusetts and shrugging off attacks that he enabled Willie Horton, polluted Boston Harbor, and looked silly in a tank, I was dispirited. CBS called Illinois for Dukakis, and then took it back within the hour. Thanks, Dan Rather. 1988 felt like a permanent Republican majority. The night of that election, at 1 in the morning, I wrote Dukakis Lives in wet cement outside my girlfriend's dorm. The next day it had been effaced beyond recognition.

Soon thereafter, I founded a liberal political newspaper with wide circulation to oppose the National Review clone then on my campus. The College Republicans stole my meeting notices for the newspaper. I walked into their campus office, asked "hey, aren't those my notices?", and took them back off their main desk as they stared, and ratted them to the campus adults, who did nothing to them. My paper did ok. The Republican paper guys got rich-kid type internships with bigger conservative papers and think-tanks (they had a feeder system and lots of money) and entered the national media, which seemed faraway and skewed to me. 1988 felt like a permanent Republican majority.

I went to law school with Obama, but didn't know him. In 1990, Harvard Law School was rent asunder with extreme politics. People were very far left or Federalist far right. I wasn't either. I was a Democrat, but not a legal academic radical who found rights to welfare in the Constitution. One day I went with two friends to hear the President of the Law Review, this Obama guy, speak outside the Harkness Commons, on campus, about minority hiring. We talked about him running for President someday. To us, being the first black President of the Harvard Law Review seemed a perfectly natural launching pad to the Presidency. The cause celebre on campus then was hiring a particular visiting professor, an African-American woman, who did not seem to this sympathetic person's view to be a good hire based upon all known facts. Nonetheless, the law school had one African-American professor among 66, which was a ridiculous state of affairs for a school that thinks itself the leading law school in America and the world. I don't remember what Obama said. I believe it was advocacy for this professor, and I remember disagreeing with it. I remember thinking that he was a great speaker, and just liking the guy. In your gut, you knew he was too good not to Be Something. Something Big. He was undeniably special, and that was Obvious.

In 1992, except for a brief flirtation with Paul Tsongas, who was too good to be President, I always supported Bill Clinton. I thought all year he'd win. Buchanan's 40% or so in New Hampshire made it crystal clear. I loved the NYC convention, and was warmed by Bill, Hill, and Al. But it didn't feel like it does now. The promise of control of the government was spent in overreach and the Contract With America. Clinton was adroit in outfoxing Gingrich in the shutdown, and engineering his reelection. But it was a rearguard action in a conservative time. Clinton chose judicial nominees for their inoffensive moderation, and more were stalled anyway, in payback for Bork. Clinton was persecuted, in retribution for Iran-Contra and the crime of winning. And then Clinton made me think for the good of the country and the party that he should resign but he did not. I hated the Starr inquisition, hated the circumstance. I worried about backlash. All the while, I was following the rise of Obama. State politics were kind to him, and he rose in a way that seemed fated. When I lunched with friends from law school, we'd handicap his future. Senator? After Fitzgerald (and he was). President? Didn't know if the country was ready. Also, I had worked around Michelle briefly, and saw just how much dignity she had. She was the kind of person in a law firm placed upon every committee, burdened with representing the firm in every way, when she should have been allowed simply to have a practice. Michelle Robinson was dynamic, cool, and classy, someone to admire. Someone I could empathize with. Had a lot of friends in her position. (Digression: my aunt asked me recently whether Michelle had entered Princeton through affirmative action. People like my aunt don't get that, whatever the answer to her question, there is a correlative burden of self-justification, of service to one's perceived social group, to one's business organization or school or club, that is greater when you are a lonely, singular presence, the one Latina in a law firm, the one black woman in management. God bless my aunt, but she just doesn't get it.)

In 2000, with everyone else, I lived through Bush-Gore. Watched every minute of the ballots held up before panels of three in Florida conference rooms. Read every brief. The Democrats should always have advocated a complete recount, and not a selective, county-based recount. The Florida Supreme Court came through, but too slowly. The U.S. Supreme Court embarrassed itself, with an unprincipled, process-driven cave along party lines. Law was only politics, and we'd never know who won a Presidential election. I was angry at Greens. 2000 sucked. 9/11 happened. On 9/11, I almost got into a fistfight on a street corner. From my birth through today, I have never struck a human being. It was a singularly tragic, disorienting day. It did change the world. Suddenly, the mistaken elevation of Bush was more important than we ever could have known. Thanks, Supreme Court and Ralph Nader. Love ya. I spent a fall of lunches with my closest Republican friend, in oddly flipped positions. I kept advocating troops on the ground immediately in Afghanistan. My friend, loyal to Bush, preached caution and low risk. My view was to commit and take risk:  the point was to get the villains of 9/11 and effect an immediate military response, at any cost. Oddly, that critique surfaced in the first debate in 2004 from John Kerry, three years too late to have meaning. Our party was silent, and followed the President, who took us properly into Afghanistan, but too slowly. The Democratic Party was in no way leading or adding to the solution. It was a silent passenger in Bush's backseat.

In 2002, I knew Bush was lying. It was obvious Bush was lying. Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, and everything messaged from the President about foreign affairs seemed deeply deceptive. History has borne that out. Watching our nation commit to war based on these lies was disturbing, verging on disgusting. I remember Barack Obama speaking against the war beforehand. Just words, right? Not. Not. The authorization of the use of military force was understandable, but not everything understandable is right. I do not condemn those who vote for it, but it seemed deeply wrong, and transparently so to me at the time. I was talking to anyone I could about this. But I was in the 35% who were unpersuaded. And the Democratic Party was a silent passenger in Bush's backseat. Barack Obama had it right. I was proud of that, and proud of him, and waiting.

In 2004, Kerry put Obama on the launching pad in Boston. His speech was a marker of what would come. There had to be another way, a third way, a path around Rovism, the rallying of each base in parallel. Obama spoke to that. I remember thinking, he's speaking 2, 4, 8, 12 years down the road. He is speaking of the trajectory he wants to follow forward, and I was wondering how long it would take him to get there. He was so much closer, and so much more clearly fated than he had been in 1991, or the late '90s as he rose in local politics. But a black President? And he was still a state Senator. Maybe twelve years from now? Eight? But he would have the chance. He would pick the right moment, and he would have the chance.

I was one of the tens of thousands who wrote Obama's office in 2006 urging him to run, asking to organize, to help, to raise funds. Like most, I was ignored. I donated in early 2007, but saw some rough debates. Even folks in the campaign viewed those as hard to watch, I'd later hear. Thought Hillary would win. Had friends pushing me toward her. Never budged. Finally, in January 2008 I got in touch with the right people, and was able to begin organizing with lawyers, raising funds. And began suffering with every news cycle, every day since Iowa. Like an unprecedented number of people committed to this year's democratic process, inhaling polls, living this shared frenzy of information-processing, like a second job: mailing, calling, writing, organizing some events, pushing Obama stuff outward. An emotional roller coaster without parallel.

This election is to me the chance to reverse the travesty of a Presidency that never should have been. By Tuesday, we will have won the popular vote in four of the five last elections, and will now win a real majority, not a plurality. This country should never have been taken as far right as Dick Cheney and George Bush took it, to an extreme representing a fringe of committed ideologues. We will not be denied by butterfly ballots, by hanging chads, and yes, dammit, the endless stories around the theme of voter suppression that are often overstated but that say in one journalistic voice Never Again. And I have tithed to Obama to say that, in part, and admire so much my many friends who have canvassed ardently and called ardently for going out and winning this election to say that. I admire you more than I can say.

This election is the moment for my generation to take the world of power from those who have abused it before us. For a judgment that does not prize fighting for its own sake but is tough, that is progressive but clear-eyed (for example, I wish a military fate for bin Laden, not a trial in the Hague or anywhere, and think Obama does too), that listens but is not afraid to call itself progressive, or liberal. We'll make health care more widely available. Call us socialists, even though you know we're not. We'll force autos to 45 mpg. Call us green kooks. We'll rein in gross excesses in the market. Call us what you like. But as you do, call us the majority party. We have shed our glass jaw of Dukakis campaign passivity. And we are that majority. Finally.

Most importantly to me, this election means Dr. King's wish is fulfilled. The little black girls and white girls aren't just playing together. Americans are voting for people who aren't like them, in massive numbers, thirty six million votes for a woman and a black man for President, and now a black man again, twice that many votes. Reagan's insular America of my youth is dead. Grown over, moved past. Coming from my all-white high school, coming from my dad who lived in segregation in which a priest let bullies punch out a black basketball star for dancing with a white girl after a game he helped the priest's school win, I have a biracial son with a foreign-sounding name, not unlike the biracial President with a foreign-sounding name I went to school with, saw speak, and followed every step for eighteen years. My son is who I think of every time the Other is demonized, every time some xenophobe tells us about real America and real Americans, excluding with their racist dogwhistle the McCains' own adopted child. This election for me was in a way a very simple act of inclusion and antiracism. It was also a touch to an idealistic teenager who is as dead as the Reagan era he grew up in. Or maybe not. I cried the night Obama won South Carolina by twenty-nine. And as long as I live, there will never be anything as good and true to me in public life, as what we're doing today.

Or maybe not. 2008 feels like a permanent Democratic majority. My time. Your time. My son's time. Our time. A very real America that I am happy for, proud of, and so happy to live in.