The Reverend Jackson's Tears

IT’S EASY TO GET SWEPT UP in the moment, for this was certainly a historic event for not just Americans but for all people on the planet. I will long remember the moving sight of the Reverend Jesse Jackson holding his finger to half-open lips, eyes fixed into the distance, and cheeks shiny with the smear of tears. You could almost feel he was in a religious trance, savoring a glimpse of the promised land that had been denied his “Moses”, Dr. Martin Luther King. I also found touchingly tragic the high expectations voiced by ordinary Kenyans about how Barack Obama would bend his godlike visage towards the plight of their poor and divided country. I understand some Latin American and Asian communities partied at the news, or at least were impressed by the sight of America living up to its ideal of equal opportunity – even consenting to confer the highest power to a member of an ethnic minority.

A colleague of mine joked that Jackson was crying not out of joy at this triumph for blacks; instead he was thinking: “damn, that should’ve been me doing the acceptance speech!” It's boorish to believe that, to say the least. But the joke got me thinking: perhaps the US was not yet ripe for a black president when Jackson sought the Democratic nomination. Or maybe voters could not shake the recollection of his more militant youth, whereas Obama has a more conciliating, uniting personality. What’s undeniable is that America has undergone a tremendous demographic shift in recent decades, and this trend continues apace. One could easily imagine Jackson rationalizing to himself that all this was achieved in God’s time, and by God’s choice of prophet.

Yet if the passage of time, the sea change in the composition of American voters, and idiosyncratic differences between Jackson's and Obama's personalities all conspired to, at long last, devise conditions hospitable to the first black US president, more than anything else it was the faltering economy that provided the motive force behind Obama’s surge in the closing weeks of the campaign. The specter of higher unemployment was what really turned a dead heat into a clear advantage over John McCain's survey numbers.

If you look at the popular vote on election day rather than the electoral college results, it was not the thumping victory, not the sweeping mandate that the liberal media paints. Lots of people still voted for McCain, and they had mighty sound reasons for this as well. Americans voted, by and large, according to their parochial concerns, and not just because the world was watching. An electoral college landslide just means superior campaigning, but not necessarily dominance measured by that most purely democratic metric of one person, one vote.

It’s just as well that the voice of realpolitik continues to be clearly heard above the jubilation of the moment. For instance, the Arab street shrugged that American policy may not materially change in the near term, especially since the Bush-created morass would be hard to undo. Obama himself recognized in his acceptance speech that folks should brace themselves for disappointments and setbacks along the road to change. With so much on his plate (and all of it vegetables! Yuck!), the new American president should not be saddled with unrealistic expectations. Not even Superman could patch up the economy, bring the troops home from Iraq, stamp out Al Qaeda, reverse global warming, etc., etc. overnight.

It's sad that race still matters to many Americans; but Obama's victory has forever narrowed the elbow room within the racist argument. For the moment, America deserves some measure of congratulations from the rest of us. By allowing a black man to govern in the White House, the US has clawed back a bit of its badly-dissipated prestige and moral ascendancy. Well done, America.