About The Barack Obama Victory

“If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible; who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time; who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.”

Pres.-Elect Barack Obama, Election Night Speech, Chicago, IL, Nov. 4, 2008

I pondered very carefully these words by the freshly minted President-Elect as he spoke to the euphoric crowd of more than 250,000 that had flooded the city’s Grant Park to celebrate his epic achievement in an atmosphere that seemed more like a coronation than a national election night victory. From the other side of the television screen where I watched his victory speech with my wife and my mother at my side these words resonated within me with a special significance of irony, because he was touching on something that I had been experiencing not just on this special day, but throughout the entirety of this election cycle.

His words now made it all crystallize clearly for me at last. It was the disquieting realization that so many among us truly had not believed that the seminal moment the world now experienced would ever actually be realized.

“To any of you out there, anywhere, who still doubt”, I remember repeating this paraphrase of Obama’s own salient words, over and again in my mind and even verbally, out loud, in the living room to my wife and my mother as a kind of exclamation point, because it had been so very striking to me that so very, very many of us, us who were African Americans, had been so utterly disbelieving that something like this could ever in our lifetimes---HAPPEN. (I had no idea at all how Americans of other racial and ethnic backgrounds specifically felt on the subject; although I generally assumed from the virtual universal excitement wafting across the sea of faces from Grant Park that much of the nation’s citizenry probably had been at least somewhat surprised by this national election day’s events.)

I recalled how upon completing this long day driving elderly and disabled voters to the polls, I felt an acute sense of disappointment and mild anger when colleagues I had labored with at the Get-Out-The-Vote center in a minority neighborhood of Boston, reacted pessimistically as initial returns trickled in after the polls closed over the fuzzy television we eagerly watched. Even as the first returns were tallied from a couple of small hamlets in remote parts of New Hampshire, some in the overwhelmingly pro-Obama camp expressed what seemed to me an inexplicable, near hysterical nervousness that these meager returns perhaps were harbingers of an epic election night upset rather than victory.

Despite the many brave claims of confidence in victory expressed, throughout what proved to be both a hectic and exhilarating day traveling between polling outposts within the Roxbury community, more than a few of my cohorts harbored deep-seated suspicions that somehow, inexplicably “they” were “gonna steal” the election from Barack Obama; and thus deny this deserving black man his chance to become America’s first African American President. I had found these periodic comments disconcerting and finally at day’s end when the first results had come in from insignificant corners of a state that Hilary Clinton had beaten Obama in during the 2nd major Democratic primary that had rescued her candidacy after the shock of Iowa; and that in the 2004 race had revived the fortunes of John McCain against George Bush, I ran out of patience trying to soothe the fear in faces which seemed numb to my calm reasoning.

They were too unnerved and I finally realized I could not reach them.

But I did not feel as so many others apparently felt, and reacted, toward Barack Hussein Obama’s election as President on November 4, 2008. I was exhilarated by his decisive historic election and his wonderful and imminently gracious victory speech. But I did not cry, nor feel close to tears at any point then or during his subsequent, majestic inaugural ceremonies.

And unlike former Secretaries of State Colin Powell and Condeleeza Rice or Dr Bill Cosby and countless other African American public figures and celebrities whose individual narratives and tear-soaked testimonies permeated the media coverage of these events, I also must confess that I did not ever doubt that a black person could be elected president of these United States in our present times. And although I cannot recall hearing of or reading about any, prominent black public figure expressing a similar sentiment as my own, I can point to at least one individual who is on the same page with me---and that is the President---Barack Obama, himself.

I am convinced that he won the American Presidency precisely because he bore no doubt that not only he himself could achieve it, but that the “feat” itself was something, in fact, “doable”.

Now as the case of the current “junior Senator” from Illinois, Roland Burris, amply demonstrates, he was able to secure the job not merely because he, oh, so desperately aspired to have it; but also because, most importantly, he early on “saw and understood how” to secure and win it. And though his hands may yet be revealed as unclean, he has so far proved up to the task that many others undoubtedly coveted but did not have the wherewithal to accomplish.

Both President Obama as well as well as his chief strategist David Axelrod possessed the unique insight and the skill-set to get the job done; and it was not their first time achieving something politically of this magnitude.(Axelrod also managed Obama’s Illinois U.S. Senate campaign.)

It also has been for me particularly strange, as well as disquieting, to listen to the narratives of the two persons of African American descent who in recent times have most inspired me and many others, in our nation to imagine what we are now experiencing in the reality of the Obama presidential tenure. Former Secretary Powell has recently made it clear in interviews, his abiding reticence and lack of conviction about striving for the American Presidency. I cannot say with any certainty whether he ever truly believed it was possible for him to win a presidential race; but, to my mind, he certainly was “electable” under a variety of different scenarios.

For example, in the circumstances of recent Republican presidential candidate John McCain, given his reputation as a “maverick thinker” I can’t conceive that the thought of having Colin Powell as his VP side-kick didn’t cross his mind, at least once or twice, before, and probably certainly, after he chose Governor Sarah Palin for the role. I don’t know whether Senator McCain plays chess or not, but selecting Colin Powell in an attempt to checkmate the Democrats in 2008, to my mind at least, would have constituted the move of a grand master. (But, of course, maybe Colin would not have accepted if asked.)

In the looming 2000 presidential race, Powell was an apparent serious contender but he dropped out in November of 1999 citing his wife Alma’s “fears” and his own lack of “the fire in my belly”, he said a presidential candidate should have. Many serious political theorists and pundits remain convinced that had he made the run he could have won it, and duplicated much of the voter demographic garnered this time by Obama. It was considered a “slam dunk” that Powell would have carried the Black, Hispanic and Asian vote, even many of the women and liberal voters for the Republicans.

Although the prospect of Powell’s candidacy back then was really intriguing, and made me believe he had a serious shot to win, I am not certain he would have been able to carry the minority vote by the kind of margins we saw Obama achieve in 2008. For me personally at least, in the cases both of Powell as well as of Obama, political policy was more important than the imperative of setting any kind of racial precedent. I have never felt the need to have a black face in a political office to somehow validate our genetics.

Former Secretary Condi Rice confessed recently on television that she too had cried and was gratified for our nation regarding the Obama victory. And she admitted that although she had believed the feat was achievable, she thought it would have happened when she was closer to eighty rather than now, for someone from the baby boom era.

If the Republican National Committee had only listened to the now former 1st Lady, Laura Bush, early on, they would have probably been much better served to have “drafted” Condi to run with John McCain rather than the Alaska governor. (Laura had indicated to the media she wanted Condi to run for president in 2008). And if the Arizona Senator had won, given his current age of 72, Condi might have become both the first female and the first Black President all at the same time; and even before McCain himself reached age 80.

Now, finally, the real challenge that President Barack Obama’s achievement poses to those among us, who are African American, who are women, Hispanic, Asian or simply from any category of our citizenry considered “among the least of these”, whose doubts remain, about what is possible for them in our great and often vexing land, now, that he has demonstrated what can be done; yes, now it is up to those coming after him to figure out for themselves how they, themselves, can duplicate his singular, groundbreaking feat.