If we really inhabited a "post-racial" world, the news of the week would be that a Democrat has won the White House. But since we don't inhabit such a world, there is much more to the news, even more than that an African-American, far-left Democrat has won the White House.
The New York Times' Thomas Friedman clued us in the morning after, waxing rhapsodic (or something): "And so it came to pass that on Nov. 4, 2008, shortly after 11 p.m. Eastern time, the American Civil War ended, as a black man -- Barack Hussein Obama -- won enough electoral votes to become president of the United States. A civil war that, in many ways, began at Bull Run, Va., on July 21, 1861, ended 147 years later via a ballot box in the very same state."
As befitting a Pulitzer-Prize winner, Friedman was only just warming up ("For nothing more symbolically illustrated the final chapter of America's Civil War than the fact that" blah blah...). But there were others taking up a similar battle cry. Madeleine M. Kunin, former governor of Vermont (and, as she also bills herself, eternal "first woman governor" of Vermont) declared at the online Huffington Post that the election of Barack Obama "is, in a sense, the culmination of Lincoln's quest -- a more perfect union."
And, well, so it came to pass that in those earliest hours of the new era that Spike Lee went on MSNBC to tell us will heretofore be known as AB (After Barack, natch, with all past millennia relegated to BB, Before Barack), the Civil War ended, and Lincoln's "more perfect union" was achieved. What next -- or, perhaps, why bother? That is, who could ask for anything more?
One answer is Menachem Rosensaft, who, elsewhere on Huffpo, pushed the election results into a somewhat different cosmic direction. "On Nov. 4, 2008, at 11 pm," he wrote, "Robert Kennedy finally won."
I rubbed my eyes but Rosensaft continued: "Forty years after his assassination shattered dreams and brought his quest to change America to a sudden, brutal halt, Robert Kennedy reached the goal that had been denied him in life."
Now I was starting to get it. Candidate Obama, whom the media permitted to remain a political cipher behind the flowing messiah robes, is now President-Elect Obama, magic mirror of historical redress.
No doubt this would present where's-the-beef style problems for the average president, but Obama isn't destined to be the average president -- or so we have been led to believe. Or, rather, so we have led ourselves to believe.
Continued... |