A lot of you have strong, impassioned reasons why you feel that I and others should support Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama for the Democratic party’s nomination for President. Some of you may have cases which are better than others, for each candidate. I don’t wish to speak about that right now, but rather about why I feel that either of them are candidates which deserve support should they be nominated for the office.
Quite simply, no matter what policies either does or does not enact while in office, the good or bad that entails would be modest compared to the awesome power of having a woman or a black person President of the United States of America.
Our nation has, of course, endured many mediocre and even truly terrible Presidents, as the current holder of the office ought to make clear. Surely, no matter what you fear could possibly happen should your less favored candidate win, our nation will endure and grow despite it. But in thirty years, in sixty, and when our grandchildren and great-grandchildren inherit this nation, should we elect either Sen. Clinton or Sen. Obama, their world will be utterly changed.
When my parents were my age, our nation saw its finest black leaders murdered by police conspiracies, rivals, and madmen. My grandmother had to struggle to gain acceptance first as a Ph.D. candidate, then as a college professor, and finally as a university department head at times when all those things were utterly trailblazing.
We lie to ourselves, and diminish the dangerous and sometimes fatal labor that our forebears did to make this momentous moment in our nation’s history possible, when we fail to recognize its importance and its value to posterity.
This is not to say that the differences of policy, of strategy, and of the personal morality and judgment of the candidates is not important. Nor is it to say that the arguments for supporting any Democratic nominee for the office lack merit. We can and should have strong sentiments about which candidate we prefer, and about the value of supporting the party’s nominee to prevent the odious Republican candidates from attaining the office.
But we need to recognize that voting for either of these candidates, whatever their faults and flaws, does our nation a great service. We have the chance to do something so momentous and difficult for our nation that no generation until now has managed to achieve it.
These things matter. They are not merely symbols, but something real and tangible.
Should either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama be the next President of the United States, I will be very proud of what my nation accomplished that day.