The Election

The election of the first African-American is being celebrated out of all proportion to its significance. That is fine for our media, which is focused on everything as setting a record because that makes good headlines and gets readers or viewers, but we, as objective observers, need to see things in proportion to their true significance. If there is one thing I would like to accomplish in writing these political tracts, it is to slay myths and introduce a certain heterodoxy. The common wisdom promoted by a homogeneous press should not be good enough for us.

Barack Obama ran as a Democrat and a liberal who happened to be Black, not as a Black candidate, and we should cheer his election in that light. Democrats have not gotten a majority of the White vote since they became the party of Civil Rights and that has not changed. I thought it would be ironic if the first African-American candidate was the first to get a White majority, but it didn't happen. 46 percent of White women voted for Obama, an improvement over Kerry's 44% but well below 50%. As for White men - only 41% voted for Obama. Racism did not haunt Obama, but it continues to haunt the Democratic Party, and it will not be forgiven for standing up for the rights of people of color. The difference in the outcome is voters of color, who will change the nature of our politics as they increasingly represent an ever greater percentage of the total electorate and are projected to soon become the majority of our population. But even among the white population the future looks bright. 54 percent of young white voters supported Obama, compared with 44 percent who voted for McCain. In the past three decades, no Democratic presidential nominee has won more than 45 percent of the votes of young white voters.

The Right is seizing upon the election of our first President of color as proof that all discrimination has ceased, and that we no longer need to worry about the discrepancies of income, education and opportunity between our White population and those of color. But they have been making that argument since the beginning of the Civil Rights movement, and never saw a problem when people of color were denied the right to vote and even the right to life. They asserted that State rights were more important than the right to life, as people of color were being lynched.

Yes we have come a long way since then, but no thanks to the denizens of that hardy breed, sometimes called crackers, sometimes rednecks, who the Republican party welcomed into their ranks as part of their Nixon Southern strategy.

In a way the election of an African-American is negative for the movement for real equality, because the President for the very reason that he is an African-American will not want to seem to favor other African-Americans or even Affirmative action. But the movement for equality will, nevertheless, get a tremendous boost from this election, for it is to be expected that the children in the African-American ghettos, who now aspire to be basket ball players, or hip-hop artists, or worse, gang members, and who too often see education as being a "White thing", will now see education as their prerogative and realize that education is the way to empowerment.

What an example our African-America President elect is already setting, not only for people of color but for all fathers, when days after his election, in the midst of a national crisis, he takes the time to attend a parent-teacher’s conference for his young daughters.

Our new President also sets us on the right course when he says there are no Red states or Blue states, there is only the US states, and rejects this oversimplification of our media. When the voting population of a state goes Republican by 51% it does not make that a Republican state. Nor does it become a Democratic state when in the next election it goes Democratic by 51%. These are small electoral changes. They may change the outcome of an election and with it the policies that guide our government, but they do not significantly change the make-up of the population. We must remember that even in states where racists are abundant, there are many decent folks, who happen to be in a minority, but who deserve not to be forgotten simply because our electoral system chooses not to count them.

But it is a mistake to suggest that in seeking unity and bipartisanship the winners in the election must shrink from the task of governing in the way that the electorate has entrusted them to do. Seeking bipartisanship does not mean giving the defeated factions veto power over the policies with which the electorate has entrusted the winning party. It does mean listening, and if the opposing party has any good ideas they must not be rejected because they come from the other side. But the voices from the losers warning that if the winning party actually does the things, which they pledged to do during the election, they will lose, must be rejected resoundingly. Their concern that Democrats might lose rings hollow. Isn’t that the very thing Republicans seek. If they join in support of the task at hand they are welcome, but if they choose to obstruct they must be overcome by all means available. The task at hand both in foreign and domestic policy is huge and our government must bend all its talent and all its forces to the national good. But the policies of the past eight years, and even the policies that had their genesis in the Reagan era have been discredited. Supply side economics has been discredited. We must build from the bottom up and not from the top down. A new day is dawning. We must not shrink from the task ahead.