Speechless: A Rilly Long Election Entry

November 17, 2008

Filed in: The Home Front, The Way We Live Now

I know, it’s been 13 days and I still haven’t written a thing.

Partly—mostly—it’s because lots and lots of better writers said it more eloquently already. All I can do is say “amen” to their “amens.”

And a little bit it’s also because, like many other people in the United States and maybe everywhere in the world, I woke up the day after the election and realized nearly every other part of my life was in serious disarray, thanks to months of election-obsession neglect.

So all I’m going to do here is piggyback on what were, for me, the most well-written bits and sprinkle in a few tiny memories of my own.

First, from the man himself:

“If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible; who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time; who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.

It’s the answer spoken by young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Latino, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled - Americans who sent a message to the world that we have never been a collection of Red States and Blue States: we are, and always will be, the United States of America.

It’s been a long time coming, but tonight, because of what we did on this day, in this election, at this defining moment, change has come to America.”

New York Times, day after the election:

“Barack Hussein Obama was elected the 44th president of the United States on Tuesday, sweeping away the last racial barrier in American politics with ease as the country chose him as its first black chief executive.

The election of Mr. Obama amounted to a national catharsis — a repudiation of a historically unpopular Republican president and his economic and foreign policies, and an embrace of Mr. Obama’s call for a change in the direction and the tone of the country.
But it was just as much a strikingly symbolic moment in the evolution of the nation’s fraught racial history, a breakthrough that would have seemed unthinkable just two years ago.”

[Note that, for all the chills those paragraphs bring, I have to agree with lots of other people who pointed out that a) there are still lots of racial barriers out there and b) it’s weird to make his election be about race when the entire campaign tried as hard as the extreme Republicans would let it to NOT be about race.]

Me:

The Sunday before election day, C and I went to a call-center close by and spent a half-hour calling New Hampshire and a half-hour calling North Carolina (which, finally, days later, was called for Obama. Yay us.) Mostly we got nobody home. Next best was “hell, yeses,” of which there were a lot. In NC, lots and lots of old-sounding, black-sounding people on the phone. With what sounds to very white Northerners like us to be funky, funky names (one guy we called was “Sept,” which we felt sure was a typo, until his grandson answered and told us “Sept” was out right now. Must be short for “Septimus”?) Anyways, it was probably the most black people C had talked to in his young life. I’m ashamed to say that, but what are you going to do: Swellville is so white, it glows at night. End of story.

Andrew Sullivan, from just before the election:

“The reason for the wave of optimism behind Obama – just look at the massive crowds across the country this past year – is almost entirely due to the profound national demoralization of the recent past. Iraq and Afghanistan, Katrina and the financial meltdown, torture and religious extremism: all these have led many Americans to the brink of despair about their own country. A historically unprecedented number of Americans believe their country is on the wrong track and view Obama as the vehicle to repair it.”

Me:

Election morning, I got up really early and high-tailed it down to the polls, not to root for Obama in this blue-blue-blue state, but to hold signs convincing people not to trash the school system by voting away the income tax.

I stood on purpose next to a nice young interracial guy holding signs for the Republican state Rep., whom I happen to know (the Rep, not his rep.). Dude was 30-something, married no kids, straight-ticket Republican (which I couldn’t help telling him was pretty “old school.” ) For awhile there, he thought he was talking to a fellow Republican, and made few fairly tame “those crazy Democrat” comments, till W and his buddy showed up, all happy and proud with their homemade Obama signs. Whoops. We had the guy surrounded. Kind of fun, and he was good-natured about it.

When I went in to vote, I really truly did get tears in my eyes, coloring in my little oval for Obama/Biden. Voting for a black man, wtf. Then I had to go back to Mr. Young Republican, and I felt bad because I wanted to share the moment with someone, just not…him.

Nicholas Kristof, Times:

“Barack Obama’s election is a milestone in more than his pigmentation. The second most remarkable thing about his election is that American voters have just picked a president who is an open, out-of-the-closet, practicing intellectual.”

[Can I say this is almost more important to me than the racial barrier—finally returning to the now-novel idea that smart people should be the ones ruling the country?]

More on the same theme from Timothy Egan, Times, weekend before the election:

“Republicans have been insinuating for years now that some of the brightest, most productive communities in the United States are fake American.

Brainy cities have low divorce rates, low crime, high job creation, ethnic diversity and creative capitalism. They grow good people in the smart cities.

But in the politically suicidal greenhouse that Republicans have constructed for themselves, these cities are not welcome. They are disparaged as nests of latte-sipping weenies, alt-lifestyle types and ‘other’ Americans, somehow inauthentic.

If that’s what Republicans want, they are doomed to be the party of yesterday.”