What Obama's Victory Means to Me

"Since the beginning of our American history we have been engaged in change, in a perpetual, peaceful revolution"--FDR

Yesterday was the latest stage in that peaceful revolution. From Jefferson to Jackson to FDR to Reagan, the election of a new president has often ushered in a new era. For me, it is a privilege to be a part of President-elect Obama's revolution. There are moments in history which are only seen as pivotal in retrospect, and other moments that the historical actors know will have resounding importance. The election of Barack Obama is certainly one of the latter moments; the celebrations in the streets around the country and the world attest to that.

I had only a minor role in this peaceful revolution: a few hours here and there volunteering to help get out the vote during the primaries, register new voters, and arranging rides to the polls on election day. The funny thing about this revolution is that the thresh hold for participation seemed to be as simple as believing in Obama. Everybody I heard on their cell phones yesterday--including friends who weren't from the U.S. and couldn't vote here--was announcing, "We did it!"

We. The power of Us. Of the many, rather than the few. Of the hopeful, not the cynical. That is the source of Obama's power and why we expressed collective jubilation in the streets last night. He made us believe that we could make a difference, not just in individual lives but in the way we govern ourselves, the way we discuss politics, the way we conceive of race. That's why his victory is not just his own, or even African-Americans'.

This is only my second time voting for president, and I did not grow up in a time or a place where race or gender were obvious barriers to success. I grew up hearing that "anybody could be president," and it never disturbed me that all of our presidents had been white males. It was only a matter of time, I always felt. Yet I was surprised at the elation I felt yesterday after I pressed the button to vote for our first African-American president. I always knew the day would come, but the reality of it made me so happy I practically skipped down the street as I left the polls. I had voted for a man who might not have even been able to vote, much less run for president, when my parents were growing up.

This victory does not just mean that anybody can become president. It means that even in a country where there is still bigotry and hate, in a world riven by divisions of class and ethnicity and religion, there is space to halt and change paths. Where that path is going to lead we can't be sure. But for the first time I am more than just wishing for a change--I have seen that change and I have been part of it.

In violent revolutions, there is anger; in peaceful revolutions, there is hope. I cried tears of joy last night, and this morning I awoke to a new America.

The Socialist Mystique

I've been puzzled recently by why the crowds at McCain rallies are booing wildly at McCain and Palin's claims that Obama is a socialist who wants to "spread the wealth." Part of my confusion is due to the fact that I have no problem with redistribution of wealth, but I think a larger part is because calling somebody a socialist hasn't been a common political tactic for most of my lifetime. I seriously doubt that most Americans even know what socialism is. In that case, what is the resonance of the term for people a generation older than I, people for whom "socialist" is a bad word?

I initially hypothesized that socialism is just a 21st-century way of accusing Obama of being a communist, and I'm well aware that calling somebody a communist during the Cold War was both a very serious charge and a cynical political tool. To be a communist was--as, if you follow McCain's rhetoric, being a socialist is--to be anti-American. What I hadn't considered was the connection such accusations had to race. As Adam Serwer explains in the American Prospect, "Conservatives, now and in the past, have turned to 'socialism' and 'communism' as shorthand to criticize black activists and political figures since the civil-rights era."

What I am still at a loss to explain is the McCain supporters' horror at the idea of "spreading the wealth." That is (to a limited degree) what taxes and church tithes have done for centuries. Were the Republican party still pro-small government and anti-spending, I could understand opposition to this idea. But can you remember who our last fiscally-conservative, Republican president was? Popular consesus among my historian friends says--Herbert Hoover. Ah, the irony.

Protesting Palin

The one and only Sarah "Barracuda" Palin graced my neighborhood with her presence on Friday night. We heard on local news in the afternoon that she'd be stopping by a local bar for a fundraiser. It just so happened that our weekly department happy hour was at the bar right next door. So, as crowds began to gather outside and there were signs that the motorcade was about to arrive, we abandoned our drinks to join the Obama supporters/Palin haters outside.

How, exactly, do you protest somebody's mere presence? There were a number of clever signs, ranging from "I'm more qualified to be VP than Palin" to "Sarah Palin? Thanks but no thanks!" Others addressed specific issues relating to Palin, from reproductive choice to banned books.

I often wonder about the purpose of protests, especially small ones like this. For me, at least, being there and chanting with the crowd was a way to release the frustration and anger I've felt since Palin was picked at the republican VP nominee. I can only hope we made her uncomfortable enough in the neighborhood to keep her from a return visit.

Ignorance and the American Voter

There are two things I think every voter in America should be at least vaguely knowledgeable about: recent political history and candidate's current policy positions. In both this campaign and the last one I worked on, I wanted to be able to engage with voters who were undecided and make the case for the candidate I was supporting. But as I wrote recently, American politics and the media coverage of it seem to operate on truthiness rather than truth, on instincts rather than facts. It's hard to engage with voters and have a meaningful debate when they are utterly uninformed.

The author of a recent book entitled Just How Stupid Are We? Facing the Truth About the American Voter argues that once television news became more popular than newspapers, "shallowness was inescapable as Americans began judging politicians by how they looked and acted." Voters today are more ignorant than ever on even the basics of our political system. If only 2 in 10 Americans knows how many senators we have, can we really expect them to know the candidates positions on the issues?

Being informed is not just about reading up on policy during the elections, though. A deeper understanding of recent political history is often necessary to really understand candidates' positions. A perfect example is John McCain and the Keating 5, particularly given what's happening with our economy right now.

This amusing video from Blogger Interrupted illustrates my point about lack of both historical and policy knowledge perfectly. Enjoy!

Registering Stories

Yesterday I spent a while at the Obama campaign checking over voter registration forms before the information was entered into the campaign's database. I thought it would be a pretty boring job; all I had to do was review all of the required fields and make sure things were filled in properly. As it turned out, though, sometimes the data told a story.

For instance, a fellow volunteer and I each found a registration form which had the word "human" filled in for race. It's optional to list race, so we have to assume that these forms were filled out by two people registering at the same time who decided to make either a statement or a joke. Then there were the ones with "change of party" checked off at the top and "Democrat" checked off below. Since we're past the primaries, changing party affiliation at this point is most likely a statement of great frustration.

One voter I noticed was born on November 1, 1990. That means he is just making it; if he had been born 5 days later, he would have had to wait another four years to vote for president. Other voters were at the other end of the spectrum; I saw many forms for people born in the 1920s or 1930s who were just registering for the first time. If this is really the first time these people felt compelled to vote, the election is even more monumental than I'd thought before.


P.S.--In retrospect, I realize that the way I was reading these registrations is actually the way social historians read data. Some historians can do really sophisticated analysis from data just like these forms, ranging from immigration forms to census records to account books. It's not the type of history that's ever

The Triumph of Truthiness

A blogger on Daily Kos today stated what's been on my mind a lot lately: "For Republicans, there is no longer any moral taboo whatsoever against lying outright." While lying isn't an exclusively Republican phenomenon, it certainly figures large for the Karl Rove Republicans. The problem seems to be that to Rove and his followers, "truthiness" is more important than facts--and, sadly, the media has played along.

Truthiness, a word coined by Stephen Colbert, was defined by the Macmillian English Dictionary as "the quality of stating facts that you believe or want to be true, rather than stating facts that are known to be true." Wishing something was true doesn't make it so: in Freud's terms, that's what creates an illusion. Illusions derive from and play to our instincts rather than our intellects.

We know all too well from the Republicans' attacks on Obama, evolution, global warming and academia how they feel about intellectualism. Bush, Rove, and his followers represent the triumph of truthiness and instinct at the expense of rational thought. You can't debate an instinct; but when does truth via instinct--truthiness--become lying?

Fortunately, two groups are fighting truthiness with truth. FactCheck.org is a nonpartisan organization that is doing the job the media isn't: revealing the truth behind politicians' claims (this site, too, avoids the term "lying" to use more neutral words like "flubs" or "false claims"). Media Matters investigates conservative "misinformation" spread by the media.

I want to live in a country of truth rather than truthiness, of intellect rather than instinct. As this campaign season progresses, I'm increasingly worried that truthiness is winning the battle.

Update: WaPo covers this same topic. The article notes that "Fed up, the Obama campaign broke a taboo on Monday and used the "L-word" of politics to say that the McCain campaign was lying about the Bridge to Nowhere."

Satirizing inspiration

Despite my own tendency to be cynical, I've been alternately surprised, amused, and distressed by the satires of Barack Obama this past week. The only way the media seems able to describe what Obama symbolizes to his enthusiastic (even ecstatic) followers is through satirizing him as the Second Coming. See, for example, this political cartoon or The Daily Show's mock bio. While I think both of these are funny, the comment of one aging white politician to another in the political cartoon is telling--"Ok, this is too much." It's as if the liberal establishment, too, isn't quite sure what to make of the fervor of Obama's followers. These old white men have never drawn the crowds Obama has, and I get the sense that they have never seen it as their role to inspire people or even really to shake things up.

When people are inspired, of course, there's a much greater chance that things will get shaken up. It's a fear of what these inspired crowds might do that I see in David Brook's stinging satire of Obama's acceptance speech. The most scathing line of the column addressed how Brooks sees my generation, which has largely backed Obama:

We meet today to pass the torch to a new generation of Americans, a generation that came of age amidst iced chais and mocha strawberry Frappuccinos®, a generation with a historical memory that doesn’t extend back past Coke Zero.

If my generation could remember what happened in past decades free of fancy caffeinated beverages, Brooks suggests, we might not latch on to Obama. But in fact, any memory of how our nation has changed when spurred by the leadership of inspirational figures does just the opposite.

History remember moments when people have come together in common cause to fight injustices, not through cynical satires, but as turning points. No matter how this election turns out, I hope this movement follows through on the passion of this campaign to effect some desperately-needed change in America.

(Cleverly) Collapsing Categories

When I told a friend that I was writing a paper on WASP culture, she told me I had to check out the website "Stuff White People Like." I wasn't sure what to expect when I went to the site; how on earth do you lump an entire race together and discover common interests? Well, it turns out that by "white," the site really means middle to upper class, liberal whites. Since I fall into that category, maybe that's why I find it so funny. Number 81 on the list, Graduate School, really hit home:

Being in graduate school satisfies many white requirements for happiness. They can believe they are helping the world, complain that the government/university doesn’t support them enough, claim they are poor, feel as though are getting smarter, act superior to other people, enjoy perpetual three day weekends, and sleep in every day of the week!

Presumably the "hardworking white Americans" that Hillary Clinton recently said were supporting her wouldn't see themselves on this site. Funny as the site is, I think it reflects a tendency in America to talk about class by talking about race. The Newshour had a great discussion about the media's treatment of race during the presidential campaign; the commentators all agreed that the media was vastly oversimplifying some complicated categories.

We hear a lot more about the black/white divide in this election than old/young, urban/rural, or even class divides. And when we talk about people in the lower income brackets, they are the "working class," a term which connotes whites. But Stuff White People Like tries to understand how its audience views this class in the post Knowing what's best for poor people:

Deep down, white people believe if given money and education that all poor people would be EXACTLY like them. In fact, the only reason that poor people make the choices they do is because they have not been given the means to make the right choices and care about the right things.

Is this attitude that much better than a Republican girl's comment on this post that "we don’t want to give away our hard-earned money and/or inherited money to the unemployed population who are too lazy to work or too stupid to quit having kids they can’t afford"? There's obviously a class divide here on both sides of the aisle, and I hope we don't have to wait for a Rev. Wright to start discussing it.

Pennsylvania Holds a Primary

After working on the Kerry campaign, I swore I wouldn't work on another campaign again. Well, it's the next campaign cycle and I've already broken that promise to myself. Despite the e-mails piling up asking me to volunteer for Obama the past two months, I waited until yesterday to help out. So for this election day, at least, I didn't feel the emotional charge that builds up from investing so much of your time in a campaign.

What I did get to feel, though, was this amazing connection (in grad school speak, an "imagined community," perhaps?) with everybody I saw on the street who was also wearing Obama pins or shirts. Philly was overwhelmingly behind Obama, so everywhere I walked there were people behind the same cause I was fighting for. I didn't talk to most of these people; it was mostly just a smile of acknowledgement that passed between us.

Campaign headquarters in Philly the past two days were full of supporters from up and down the mid-Atlantic. People seem to have just driven in to Philly and come straight to the headquarters to see what they could do. I helped one of these people, a woman who had taken the day off of work in D.C., to navigate around Center City and drive elderly people to the polls. I also went door to door earlier in the day, which I must admit, I wouldn't offer to do again.

Even though Obama didn't win today--and really, I don't think anybody expected he would in PA--the day felt like a success for me in other ways. First, with all of the research I've done on politics in Early America, I appreciate the chance to see the process firsthand. Second, I felt in these past two days that, for the first time since I moved here, I actually live in Philly and that I'm part of a community here--one even larger than the campaign. That feeling was well worth losing my voice and getting behind on schoolwork.

A Rhetorical Question

Audacity: n., boldness; fearless daring. This is what Barack Obama invoked in the title of his most recent book, The Audacity of Hope. He acknowledges here that his message of hope is not one that people will accept readily; it takes a sort of determination to go against the tedium of politics to accept his rhetoric, the title suggests. Some people I've talked to would agree--and they just don't feel quite daring enough.

The question to me is not just why they can't summon the audacity, but why we should need it in the first place. I'm not by any means a naive idealist; I'm probably more cynical than most people about politics and the failures of our government. But when a leader takes hold of the zeitgeist of the time and speaks in a way that is compelling, intelligent, even emotionally stirring, this seems to me to be exactly what we ought to embrace.

This, in great part, is what we admire about our greatest leaders, from George Washington to Martin Luther King, Jr. Let me be clear: I am not comparing his leadership abilities (as yet untested) with these leaders', but his rhetoric resonates with the sounds of his predecessors. He has harnessed MLK's intonation, and he speaks of unity, the urgency of action, and the future in ways that great leaders have in the past. Here, for instance, is a bit of Jefferson's first inaugural address:

"Let us, then, fellow-citizens, unite with one heart and one mind. Let us restore to social intercourse that harmony and affection without which liberty and even life itself are but dreary things."

and FDR's third inaugural in 1941:
"In the face of great perils never before encountered, our strong purpose is to protect and to perpetuate the integrity of democracy. For this we muster the spirit of America, and the faith of America. We do not retreat. We are not content to stand still. As Americans, we go forward, in the service of our country, by the will of God."

and MLK's I Have a Dream speech:
"We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of Now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy...

We cannot walk alone. And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead. We cannot turn back."

How, then, are these words of Obama's so very different?
"We are the hope of the future; the answer to the cynics who tell us our house must stand divided; that we cannot come together; that we cannot remake this world as it should be.

Because we know what we have seen and what we believe - that what began as a whisper has now swelled to a chorus that cannot be ignored; that will not be deterred; that will ring out across this land as a hymn that will heal this nation, repair this world, and make this time different than all the rest - Yes. We. Can."

If we know these men made great leaders, that they acted according to the boldness of their words, than why do we assume Obama is all rhetoric? It's a rhetorical question--but one very much on my mind this election.

Election time means history is up for grabs

That, at least, seems to be particularly true this year. From the comparisons between Romney's religion speech and JFK's, the controversy over MLK, Jr., brewing between Clinton and Obama, and Obama's Reagan reference, (ill-conceived) history as been at the center of some contentious debates. As historian Sean Wilentz wrote in a recent column, "In war, truth is the first casualty--but in politics, it appears that the first victim is history."

Can we really judge candidates by their invocations of the past? A group of NH newspapers which endorsed Hillary Clinton noted that her list of favorite presidents (later corrected to note that it was a list of presidential portraits she'd hand in the White House) "demonstrates how she thinks." Even worse is when historical references are deceptive or just plain wrong. Republican posturing with evangelicals often means invoking the religious faith of the founding fathers, ignoring the obvious deism and desire for separation of church and state among the founders. As one columnist notes in comparing how Romney and JFK used religious history, "Jack Kennedy had an eye for history; Romney has only a tin ear."

So what are historians looking for in a candidate this primary season? If the online endorsement of Obama by a lengthy list of history professors is any indication, they're looking for the attributes of greatness they've seen in presidents in our history who have changed "the mood of the nation." They cite Lincoln, FDR, and JFK. No founders there, but then their hopes that Obama will improve our role in the world and expand government programs wouldn't really have been on the early presidents' agendas.

Circumstances change, times change, and sometimes the examples of the past are more or less productive than others. We can't expect politicians to use history selflessly, but let's hope they can learn to use it wisely.