I think Dick Richards has done in a few short lines about as well as anybody could do to summarize one of the important meanings of Barack Obama’s election. In a post (now lost to hackers) he shared a connection for him between the shooting of John F. Kennedy and the election of Barack Obama, sharing as if a kind of mathematical expression these two events: parentheses surrounding a clause it has taken many years for us to get through. I am grateful for Dick’s insight. It adds to the notion that this is pre-eminently a victory for racial equality. There’s something here that includes equality and goes ever more deeply into the birthright of all Americans, our ideals and responsibilities, and that crosses many old social (and spiritual) boundary lines, not just one.
I remain deeply concerned about the divides of thought, feeling, and spirit that exist in our nation, and look for a new kind of leadership that helps change the game. What will it take to break down the allegiances to perspectives and values that pull us back toward the past, a past characterized by cynical responses, emotional and physical violence, mistrust, shallowness, and pain? This is a difficult question, and certainly one that no one person, no Barack Obama alone can answer. Obama distills our hopes and certainly and in very practical ways can help this country move to a new, very positive standpoint. Not long after the election was called for Obama, David Gergen on CNN stated that Obama had “opened a window on leadership” both in the United States and abroad. I cannot think of a finer compliment.
But the everyday part of the leadership required to make these changes is as much ours as his. And that, of course, has been the genius of his whole campaign. Like that twenty-six hundred year old homily from the Chinese sage Lao-Tsu: “When the best leader’s work is done the people say, ‘We did it ourselves!’ ”
Obama is a brilliant man to make the victory ours, not just his.
