A Change We Can Only Hope For

Harry T. Cook

9/05/08

He said it himself: "This election has never been about me. It's about you." So said the Democratic nominee for President of the United States in his acceptance speech last week.

Sen. Barack Obama may not have intended that wildly applauded line to be a statement about the race issue, but I took it as such. His only clear allusion to the race issue came in his peroration in which he mentioned the 45th anniversary of Martin Luther King's "I Have A Dream Speech." Obama could well have mentioned another speech, that one given in January 1965 by then President Lyndon B. Johnson. With that speech, Johnson knowingly steered his own party and the nation into a new era against the prevailing winds of reaction. LBJ went so far as to quote the King speech as he spoke of "a far larger movement which reaches into every section and state of America. It is the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life." Johnson said that cause "must be our cause, too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry." Then, amazingly, that son of the South put his presidency on the line, by saying, "And we shall overcome." It was about us. All of us.

Wouldn't it be grand to be able to say that in the 43 years since that State of the Union speech the state of the union was one of overcome racism? It would be even grander to know that Barack Obama will be elected or defeated on the merits of his campaign promises and platform and not on the basis of his skin color. I wonder if Obama ever thought of himself as a "Negro"? His oft-mentioned mother and grandparents are considered "white" in the absurd social constructs we have erected. Obama's father was a Kenyan with the skin color and features associated with that clime. So?

If Barack Obama's name were Barry O'Brien, all other things being equal, his only disqualification for the Presidency in the eyes of some critics would be his elitist background as a graduate of Columbia University, president of the Harvard Law review and a professor of constitutional law at once of the nation's premiere universities.

"And we shall overcome," President Johnson said, and, as I remember, with a heavy emphasis on the word "shall." Have we overcome? Even as cynical as life's disappointments have made me, I had actually begun to hope we had the process underway. Then just recently a member of my congregation openly confessed to being unwilling to vote for Obama "because, well, because he is black."

This from a person whose late father and mother survived the Great Depression because of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal and whose life was made infinitely easier because of the union to which her spouse belonged for all his working life. This person knows by her own admission that the fiscal and tax policies likely to be pursued in a McCain administration would be detrimental to her and others like her. Yet, she has not overcome.

Shall we overcome any time soon all these years along since King and LBJ? Columnists and talking heads fall all over themselves to join the chorus chanting, "Who is Obama? Who is Obama?" They keep saying "he has to tell voters who he is."

Well, I think we know. He is a relative new-comer to national politics who surveyed the wreckage of his nation six years into the George W. Bush presidency and decided America needed a change. He purports to be the potential agent of that change. Good luck to him on that middle-class tax cut by increasing taxes on the better off. Good luck to him on negotiating the shoals of some kind, any kind of national health care insurance. Good luck to him on ending the old partisan gridlock.

Any one of those changes would be welcome. Any two would be terrific. But the real change we could hope for would be that the greater number voters will not judge the Obama candidacy by the color of his skin - or rather that they will, and say: "So what? How fortunate we are to have such a gifted person who actually wants to put his head into the meat grinder of the presidency, who is willing to expose himself and his family to racist taunts however covert, oblique and ridiculous and help us overcome."

Candidate Obama is right: This election is about us.

NEXT WEEK: Commentary on the candidacy of Sarah Palin who sees the war in Iraq as "a task from God," and who is otherwise distinguished by efforts as mayor of her Alaskan city to fire a librarian who wouldn't ban books offensive to Ms. Palin's religious and political sensibilities. At least it was to be banning, not burning.

© Copyright 2008, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.