From Amy Goodman's column:Obama can redeem
Alice Walker is the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. But Monday, I called her to talk about a true story. The Obamas had just visited the White House. The first African-American elected president of the United States had visited his soon-to-be residence, a house built by slaves. Walker told me: "Even when they were building it, you know, in chains or in desperation and in sadness, they were building it for him. Ancestors take a very long view of life, and they see what is coming." The author of "The Color Purple," who writes about slavery and redemption, went on, "This is a great victory of the spirit and for people who have had to live basically by faith."
An amazing three weeks, and I for one am not ready to let that feeling of hope and pride go not just because of what it said about him but what it said about our country.
I know that some of my hopes will be dashed...we won't get out of Iraq soon enough for me, there will be decisions like FISA that I won't like and there will be compromises along the way.
But I cast my first vote in 1972 for George McGovern fulling believing he was going to win with all the confidence and delusion of youth that everyone thought like I did and that no one would vote for Nixon and to stay in Vietnam. Since then, I have always voted for the least hawkish presidential candidate which means I have always voted Democratic. And there have been few elections where my candidate even won much less increasing margins in Congress. In my whole voting lifetime, a presidential candidate has never gotten an electoral vote from my state which means that my vote was irrelevant-until this year.
There was something different this time. It started with my teenager getting excited about Obama-the same way I was the first time I could vote. But this time there were few false starts, and everything that needed to happen for him to get the nomination, happened.
Most pundits date September 15, the date the economy went into a nosedive(McCain: The fundamentals of the economy are strong.) as the day Obama won the election. I think it happened a little sooner: on September 12 when John McCain went on the View and was grilled about "lying." Not dirty campaigning, or distortions but lying. This was after two or three days of faux outrage over the lipstick on a pig. But whenever the victory jelled, the important thing is that it did and all the hard work and energy paid off.
Obama always had the people who wanted to change the world. In the end, he even got people willing to change themselves.