REKHA BASU: Missed moment? good read

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By Rekha Basu

I remember wishing Hillary Clinton would run. Not last January, when she announced, but before the 2004 election, when someone with her intellectual heft and stature was needed to stand up to the Bush/Rove/Rumsfeld cabal and dismantle its agenda.

But Clinton didn't run then, and when she jumped into this year's race, days after Barack Obama, it was a different field and a different moment.

This moment belongs to Obama.

The White House is virtually imploding after four more years of bungling the war, the economy and domestic crises such as Hurricane Katrina. With the president's poll numbers in the 20s and Rove, Rumsfeld and Ashcroft on the run, this is the moment for a fresh start.

My newspaper endorsed Clinton on the Democratic side. I respect its decision. But after sitting through most of the same meetings with all the original candidates, watching, reading, listening and searching my conscience, I concluded Obama was the one who can best pull off what needs to happen.

Clinton is smart, hard-working, gutsy and tough enough to absorb all the muck that's come her way. But Obama is simply a better candidate. He's that rarest of leaders, combining roots in white Midwestern America with black Africa, and experience both organizing in barrios and editing the Harvard Law Review.

He's got idealism, compassion and intellect. And he lacks the baggage Clinton comes with, including all the controversies that swirled around her husband's White House. Nor is he compromised, as she has been, by the Senate vote that got us into this quagmire in Iraq.

Clinton is likable -- and polarizing. But Obama is a uniter whose very life experience promises a new chapter for America.

On major policy issues, there is more uniting the Democrats than separating them. So the choice comes down to who can win, not just in Electoral College votes, but in hearts and minds. Who can unite a divided public and excite people's sense of possibilities? That's where Obama leaves the rest of the pack behind.

Momentum is a hard thing to quantify. It almost has to be understood viscerally. I witnessed it in a Des Moines auditorium before the Iowa caucuses, sandwiched between an unprecedented 18,000 people, all sharing a palpable sense of enthusiasm and hope. They were black, white, Latino, Asian, old, young, middle-aged and disabled.

Many had probably come to see Oprah Winfrey. But when it was Obama's turn, he had them mesmerized. Some cheered and waved signs in the air. Some hugged one another, and some even got teary. It was as if no one could quite believe this youthful but commanding man, who spoke their language and echoed their dreams, might actually run America.

It was a long way from last February, when I first heard him speak and complained he was too cerebral. Between then and now, his manner has grown commanding, and presidential.

You felt it again in Tuesday's speech from Madison, Wisconsin, another hall packed with another 18,000. And in the "Yes, We Can" video making the rounds of YouTube viewers who are usually more turned on by watching people's missteps and gaffes. He inspires people to feel good about their country again. You can't buy, bottle or fake that.

That's why the Democratic race seems to be turning in his favor: Not because he's outspent his opponents but because he out-inspired them, and people are hungry to be inspired. As Tuesday's results showed, people across the country are starting to see what we saw in Iowa in December. And they're young and old, male and female, black and white.

Some say he's not seasoned enough, but one person's experience is another's baggage. Obama has been in politics long enough to know how it works but not so long as to be compromised or cynical. He can relate to ordinary Americans. After all, as he told us, he and his wife are just four years out of credit-card debt, and she still shops at Target.

I've chastised Obama for his mistakes, and he has made some, at times sounding naive on issues he hadn't yet studied up on. But he is self-reflective and able to own up to them. He not only agrees to hear opposing viewpoints in making decisions but demands to.

While I long to see a woman or a person of color be president, neither gender nor race is criteria enough. The candidate has to be viable and stand for the right things.

With its harsh ideological agenda and unapologetic cronyism, this administration has torn through our surplus, our civil liberties and our international goodwill. Democrats four years ago squandered the opportunity to take back the White House by nominating someone who represented the same old stuff.

What's needed is a candidate who represents this new America, and inspires pride in it as it grows more multicultural by the day, and as our fate becomes more linked to the rest of the world's, whether through trade, terrorism, immigration or global warming.

We can either embrace it or wrap ourselves in the fear and xenophobia some in the GOP are preaching. Now is also the time to signal the world that America is not a monolithic dinosaur but dynamic and evolving, harnessing its diversity to enhance its strength. Obama could do that.

Rekha Basu is a columnist for the Des Moines Register. Send e-mail to [e-mail].


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