The Political Wonder That is Obama

[Emit]

This article deserves a repost, with an updated comment from its author. An excellent read, IMHO, and as fitting today as when it was originally penned by its author back in February:

HISTORIC: OBAMA U.S. DEMOCRATIC PARTY PRESIDENTIAL NOMINEE
Posted June 3rd, 2008 by PTZeleza in U.S. Affairs

Senator Barack Obama has done it! He is the Democratic Party's U.S. Presidential Party nominee after a grueling battle, the first African American in U.S. history to rise to such dizzying political heights. On February 20, I posted the following commentary which sought to explain Senator Obama's dazzling political performance. That was before the Reverend Wright's sermons and 'bitterness' remarks and the white working class were raised as road blocks to his relentless march to the nomination. He survived them all. ...

The Political Wonder That Is Obama

Posted February 21st, 2008 by PTZeleza

It has been a dazzling performance, historic in its possibilities: a black man electrifying America’s imagination, pulverizing the ferocious Clinton machine, collecting electoral victories with deceptive and decisive ease, seemingly unstoppable on his amazing journey to the U.S. presidency. That is the political wonder that is Barack Obama. It is an incredible story that has confounded pundits and scholars within the country and appears incomprehensible to many outside the United States. ...

~snip~

What accounts for Senator Obama’s meteoric rise from an obscure community organizer in Chicago to the celebrated frontrunner in the Democratic Party’s nomination for the 2008 presidential elections only three years after his election to the U.S. Senate? How has he been able to overwhelm the fabled Clinton electoral machine, forcing her once assumed inevitable candidacy into gasping for its political breath, a prospect that was unimaginable only a few weeks ago when upstart Obama’s audacity of hope was expected to perish in a Clintonian tsunami on Super Tuesday. If Senator Obama prevails and wins the nomination, and in November the presidency, still big ifs given the unpredictable twists and turns of electoral politics and the historic improbability of his candidacy, his success, and even if he does not win either, his momentous appeal thus far, could be attributed to four sets of votes: against Bush and Billary and for him and the future.

Seven years of the disastrous Bush presidency—perhaps the worst in U.S. history according to some scholars—have left most Americans deeply despondent at home and widely distrusted, if not despised, abroad. They despair over the unending and horrendously costly wars in Afghanistan and Iraq which are draining an economy reeling from a housing crisis and staring at recession and sapping the nation’s notorious self-assurance. They deplore bitter partisanship, opportunism, and callousness that have permeated and poisoned the political culture. The chickens of neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism, consummated during the Bush presidency, have come home to roost and the ugly results have been rather disquieting to many Americans leaving them yearning for new beginnings, for change. ...

It is a vote against the republicanization of America that began with the contested civil rights settlement of the late 1960s and early 1970s and which has finally run its course. Conservative principles and posturing increasingly sound like an old broken record out of step with the tempestuous rhythms of the times. This is what the Obama phenomenon has tapped into, a deep emotional need for change, for hope, for escape from the mean, fearful post-9/11 era. Watching him at his exhilarating multiracial rallies is to witness a more hopeful America gesturing to the future, a different America from that of Senator McCain who is often surrounded by dour old white men, an embarrassing public portrait that history is desperately seeking to leave behind.

If many Americans see redemption in the Democratic Party, within the party itself many are increasingly recoiling from a Clinton coronation, from a dynastic restoration of a Billary presidency. As President Clinton aggressively and angrily campaigns for his wife, Senator Clinton claims experience from her husband’s presidency, thereby both unwittingly suggesting that Hillary’s presidency will be as much Bill’s as the latter's was hers ...

~snip~

Whereas the Clinton campaign concentrated on the large states... and assumed the contest would be over on Super Tuesday and failed to plan for the day after, the Obama campaign prepared for a protracted campaign in every state, big and small, ignoring no community, rich and poor, men and women, democrats, independents and republicans, and all racial and ethnic groups in a methodical drive to win votes and delegates and, more grandly, to build a new democratic majority. No wonder he has increasingly extended his support across all demographic groups including those claimed to be bedrock Clintonites, putting the lie to one claim after another that Obama is only attractive to blacks, the young, men, and those earning more than $50,000 while Clinton has a lock on white women, the elderly, Hispanics, and blue color workers.

~snip~

The votes for Senator Obama of course also represent a vote for the future as seen most poignantly in the way his candidacy has fired up the imaginations of the youth. In a way this is a generational contest, between the post baby-boomer and post-civil rights generations and the depression era and baby boom generations. Senator McCain, 71, the presumptive Republican nominee and Senator Clinton, 60, the fading Democratic aspirant represent the latter, respectively, whereas Senator Obama, 47, was born a year after John F. Kennedy, another inter-generational icon whose mantle Obama relishes, was elected in 1960. ...

It shows that there might be a new postcivil rights generation—in terms of both age and sensibility—that does not find the idea of a black president such an improbable proposition. This hip hop and multiculturalist generation has grown up seeing blacks occupying high political offices in unprecedented numbers from mayors to governors to senators to judges to cabinet secretaries, and as professionals, not simply as idols of popular culture in sports and entertainment. This is to suggest there may be a cultural shift taking place in American society, a new social imaginary of citizenship might be emerging, underpinned by the very limited dispensations of the civil rights settlement the Republicans have worked so hard to overturn, as well as by new productions and consumptions of popular culture, and transformations in domestic and global racial geographies as articulated in demographic shifts and the circuits of globalization.

~snip~

However, as inspiring as his ascent would be, the import of his achievement would be more symbolic than substantive. In other words, a President Obama would not fundamentally alter the structural and social impediments that have long faced African Americans, nor would it significantly temper the imperialist impulses of the United States in Africa and other regions in the global South. This is because as important as the presidency is, it is only one center of power in the American hegemon dominated by the military, prison, corporate, and media industrial complexes. And Senator Obama is not, in any meaningful way, a radical, let alone a revolutionary figure; if he was he would not have gone this far in the deeply conservative American political system and culture. He is as ensconced in the American mainstream as are all the white men and the white woman who have sought the presidency during this presidential election cycle. That does not mean I will not welcome, or even celebrate his victory. After all, I have made a small contribution to his campaign, my first in an American election, and his victory would be a welcome return on that investment. More importantly of course it would offer us all some respite from the unrelenting terror and mediocrity of the Bush years.

http://www.zeleza.com/blogging/u-s-affairs/political-wonder-obama