On With Obama

Last Saturday, a racist, right-wing relative in South Carolina crossed party lines for the first time in 40 years to vote for Hillary Clinton.

It was a proud moment when I once stopped him before he got started on one of those sickening, giggling in-joke rants most racists I've met use to dress up their hatred in what passes for good-humor. I did this by effusively describing one of my best students, who was African-American, and was taking a break from her intense piano studies to apply to Harvard. Cheerfully blathering on about her artwork, her beauty, her discipline, I wasn't expecting to convert him, I was expecting him to shut his pie-hole. He still possessed the faculties to recognize the awkwardness of being thought a boor by family, at least during lunchtime.

But why did he think to vote for Hillary Clinton? Something to do with stopping the "Democrats who hate rich people" and the big companies who are so important to America. Or Democrats with darker complexions.

I think he is afraid. He is somewhat afraid of Edwards' populism. But he is much more afraid of Barack Obama's power and appeal, enough to cross party lines, enough to vote for Hillary Clinton.

It is dismaying, even after Obama's crushing victory in South Carolina, for some Democrats to try to continue to marginalize Obama as just a black candidate. The white vote in South Carolina split fairly evenly among the Democratic candidates.

And there's another word for black voters: Voters.

Here's how cynical this really is: the Clintons are far from racists and have done much personally to end the soul-sucking racial divide in America. But they are clearly maneuvering to take advantage of what they perceive as latent racism in their own party, regardless of the social cost.

Bill Clinton comparing Obama's historic S.C. victory to Jesse Jackson's is a code to white voters: Obama is no different from Jackson: his issues are just black issues. The actual message of that is that a black candidate cannot represent America as a whole. This diminishes both Obama and Jackson. I don't think Clinton actually believes this- but he's too smart not to be aware of the subtext.

It worked to an extent: it brought my racist relative into the Democratic primary. Yay. But young white voters in the South rejected these tactics, as they are beginning to everywhere. Racism is not the default position of young Americans, nor is sexism, nor homophobia. They have far more friends - and lovers, going by recent surveys - of other races than their Boomer parents.

(Note, this was written before Edwards dropped his campaign yesterday. I now regret anything bad I said. - FSL ) John Edwards adopted positions closer to my own: get the bastards, and when they're down, kick them in the neck and fill out their name and address on gay-themed magazine subscription forms. That was the game of the bastards, and we have been forced to play it. But Edwards doesn't really have a strong history of this until after he left the Senate, although he's done some fantastic work and has the most developed policy positions of the campaign, I don't completely trust him. He was a wealthy lawyer much longer than he's been a progressive, and his Senate record doesn't seem to match his current position. He was distant, even Lieberman-like in the 2004 General- where was the fire then, when the country needed it more, when the danger to the country was obvious? I am impressed that he came around, and particularly that he returned poverty to the forefront of the national agenda and created an effective foundation, but I can't shake the feeling that these positions are somewhat pasted on, that his soul isn't this. This might be translating into a faltering campaign.

But Barack Obama is letting me feel like an American again, stirring the national soul from dormancy: that all of us are made equal, that we can live freely, and that we can leave our nation and our world better for the future -words that for all my life were the soft gooey center of a skeptic's shell, and had grown into meaningless platitudes, like the word "love" in a McDonald's ad. They are not just tools to this man.

It's a lot to paint on a guy who's a couple years older than me. But Obama's campaign has already done several remarkable things that are contributing to what I begin to believe will not only be a successful presidential campaign, but a substantial transformation of American political culture.

Ted Kennedy's endorsement yesterday captured the sense of it: Obama has touched the shared American soul. Liberty, Equality, and Brotherhood - American values well before they were French. Independent voters, even Republicans, are drawn to Obama, even powerfully so. I think part of this is that Obama has given them what you might call permission to progress. They can think about how to fix the country without having to defend their indefensible past. (This means you, George Will and David Brooks).

I raise a difficult point now, because I respect John Edwards supporters - I was very nearly an Edwards supporter myself. But I think Edwards should bring his campaign to a close. Losing South Carolina so badly, he's facing, to use a nerd analogy, a couple of 150 hit-point Balrogs, and throwing this to the convention only does the Republicans good.

Hillary Clinton's argument is essentially that she is the most skilled and tested opponent to the Republicans. She's been running a pretty mean and shitty campaign- sporadic dirty tricks, hollow spin. She has become what I've been calling a corporatist - meaning that she essentially accepts corporate dominance of society - and oozes a sense of political entitlement that I think is dangerous to the future. This is not a deal-breaker, and she would be orders of magnitude better than the Bozo Administration, but I think we can do better.

Words do matter, when they mean something. The Presidency, politics and the law, is very much about words: poetry with consequences. Take the Bible, Hamlet or the U.S. Constitution. They're full of words.

What I can tell you is that my students here in Washington State, without any prodding from me, are motivated by Barack Obama. They are getting involved, even thrilled. He has already broken through the cynicism and self-defeat of the next generation in a way that Howard Dean couldn't hope to.

Barack Obama is going for the win. His progressive credentials are his entire life. That he is a Constitutional scholar is not a minor point. He believes, and articulates in a way no one has in a half-century, that Americans do really want their freedoms, they do want to take care of each other, and particularly, want to include everyone in this. He is the most persuasive, compelling progressive to run a serious presidential campaign in my lifetime, and he has my support.

By the way, whoever you're supporting, take a bunch of voter registration forms with you. Ask friends. If unregistered, hand them the form. If they are registered and know unregistered people, hand them some more forms. I've handed out dozens. It may be the best thing you ever do for your country.