I have conflicting emotions right now. Today while I was at work I was thinking over the New York Times article from earlier this week on the relationship of John and Elizabeth Edwards, and their effort to transcend personal grief and hardship by trying to make the world a better place, and I actually had to wipe away a few tears. I thought about how much they have lost, and how much they have given, and I hoped from the bottom of my heart their campaign would win and I could see them celebrating victory tonight. Not just for themselves, but for all of us in this country who suffer in the shadow of plenty. Instead, I saw Barack and Michelle Obama celebrating, and despite myself I felt not angry or aggrieved but proud.
Now, I want to stress that I am not at all shifting my support from Edwards, a candidate who did actually defeat a former first lady who is perhaps the most famous woman in the world, and who outspent him on television ads in Iowa by three to one. Edwards, rightfully, is continuing forward with his campaign, and I hope more than anything to see him be the beneficiary of Hillary Clinton's decline. He is, and as far as I am concerned, will always be of these candidates the one who is right on the issues and who would be the best president for America.
However.
Obama's victory tonight in Iowa makes me feel more confident in the goodness of America than anything has in a long time. The spectacle of he, his wife, and his little girls on that stage in Des Moines seemed almost like magical realism. In a nation where forty-three years ago he would have been prohibited from voting in many states, and where until very recently deep and pervasive stigma defined the lives of persons of mixed race, that beautiful image is downright unreal. Barack Obama, winner of a major party presidential contest in a state 93 percent white, and family.
And swirl the victory around in your mind like wine in a glass, and you see further, more distant significances. What does it mean for Kenya's democracy, fraying because of intransigence over tribal divisions, that the most famous person of Kenyan ancestry on the planet was elected by people so very different from himself? What does it mean, for a world snared ever more violently by ever more arbitrary, even farcical, divisions among people, that Americans demonstrated so decisively today the beauty and simplicity and joy of stepping outside these old hatreds?
I have made the argument on dailykos, most certainly not for the last time, that the symbolic value of Obama's candidacy and a prospective Obama presidency should not outweigh the serious and real substantive differences between the candidates on the issues. But, for tonight, certainly, the significance of what has happened to our country has to be owned and contemplated. We have to let ourselves feel it.
And it has to be said he gave perhaps the best speech I have ever heard a politician deliver tonight, words that matched precisely the world-changing event on which they were delivered, historic and ennobling.
So, yes, tomorrow we will all go back to arguing about health care, and social security, and trade, and about the issues where I think Obama does not live up to the best of his ideals--like equality for gay and lesbian Americans.
But tonight was a great night not just for the Obama campaign or the Democratic Party, but for our country, and for our world.
And I honor Barack Obama for that.