Last week I published my friend Andrew Lewis's remarkable diary, Swimming in John McCain's Pool, which got some very warm reactions from the DKos community. Now he's letting me post this wonderful letter he just sent John McCain, who remains his senator. If you like it, please advise Andrew to join the community and start posting here regularly!
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Dear Senator McCain,
I live and work on the Hopi reservation in northeastern Arizona. Where we live is remote and scarcely touched by the national political debate. The Hopi have few financial reasons, and frankly the national electoral process is not widely accepted here. We are an electorate of only a few hundred registered voters out of 10,000 residents. As a candidate we are not worth your time or consideration, we are not worth anybody's time or consideration. And yet we are your constituents.
On Tuesday night my family and I gathered at the home of my daughter's grade school teacher. We all teach or do non-profit or social service work. Most of us receive little compensation. Some receive no compensation at all. That evening, gathered around the only television set amongst us, we reveled in this historic moment. We are all Democrats, and we have all suffered viscerally under the indignities of the last eight years.
After a long and hard fought campaign, after stolen elections and nearly a decade of burst hopes, we all wept openly and gratefully and with immense relief at your opponent's victory.
And quite unexpectedly, we found ourselves moved by the dignity and humility of your own concession speech. Your graceful words were honorable, and honorably spoken. Some among us felt that you appeared visibly relieved: relieved that this long contest is at last over, relieved that in this moment you were at last free to be yourself without having to sell yourself. Perhaps relieved as well that at least for a brief moment you had reprieve from the more extreme elements of your Party, from the poison of rhetoric, from the visible frustration at your campaign's inability to gain traction on the slope of history.
I was deeply disheartened, but perhaps not surprised, by the anger and frustration voiced by your supporters at your concession speech. I was equally honored, however, in how, with your one word, simply "Please..." tinged with frustration and force, you attempted to reign in those lesser impulses. I was reminded how you are a better man than the one presented to us in the recent weeks and months, and your better self was once again revealed to us. For all of us in the room, we were relieved and grateful to once again witness that side of John McCain. We wondered about the ways in which a candidate becomes beholden to his campaign, to his advisers and handlers, to the desperation or exhaustion or heat of the moment. We considered how you were robbed of your moment in the 2000 election, and how, if you had prevailed, what a different world we might today inhabit. Unfortunately, we as a nation were robbed as well.
And now this moment in history belongs, and perhaps always belonged inevitably and irrevocably, not to you or to Hilary Clinton, but to Barack Obama.
One of my friends here tearfully recalled the moments in which she as a Native American was made to feel less than equal, how when she went to college her assigned roommates requested to be moved because they did not want to, they could not, room with someone of a different color. Why? she had wondered. What is wrong with me? Tuesday night's victory (and your defeat) was for her a vindication, and for her a reprieve from a lifetime of ill thought and hurt.
On election day, I spoke with another Hopi friend. I asked if he would vote and he hesitantly admitted that he would not. He had abstained for religious and cultural reasons. When there is a contest, a fight, he explained, there is always a victor. And there is always one who suffers defeat. And between them is a divide. And after that fight the division remains, rarely or only with great effort can it be repaired. And we can't have division, he said. Our role as Hopi is to bring everyone together, to help us be of one heart and one mind so that we can do the good work that needs to be done. In an election we have all these words and fighting and we forget this, we forget what its about. It's about life, he said. It's about all the life that is out there and helping it to go on. And if we are divided we cannot help it go on.
64 million Americans found common ground in victory on Tuesday night. And 56 million did not. We are yet a house divided.
Over the last 48 hours, I, and the nation of 64 million of which I am a part have celebrated and been engulfed by rolling waves of joy. And equally the 56 million which you represented have not been able to participate, or at least participate fully, in that exultation. They perhaps are consumed with fear, or anger, or resignation, or indignation. They may feel sentiment similar to a blogger I read this morning who vowed that "a nigger would never be his President." Or with kinder hearts, they may feel that they exist in an America that does not share there values or may even lack any spiritual values at all. Or they may feel that the right to abortion is as grievous a practice as once was slavery and that it must be resisted without compromise. Or they may mistrust the patriotism of your opponent, or the soundness of his fiscal policy, or they may be deeply scared by the economic uncertainty visible around them. Or they may simply fear that which we do not know: the role and place of America in an ever changing and complex and multilateral world. Regardless, many do fear. And many are yet angry and saddened. I can imagine they feel the fear and despondency that, frankly, would have overwhelmed me and my peers if you yourself had been elected. We are yet a house divided.
Some of the anger and catcalls and booing displayed at your campaign rallies were sometimes unfortunately summoned by you or (more frequently) your running mate in the heat of the contest for hearts and minds. All may be fair game in the mud pit of a campaign, but all is not right. Some fires were consciously stoked and lit by your running mate while some of the emotions may have been present and latent and simply brought to the surface. You did not create deep seated racism or fear of the other, but the historical nature of the 2008 campaign has led people to give voice to it.
Now that the campaign is over, I realize that it is incumbent upon me to reach out to those people who are yet angry at Obama's victory. But oddly, I do not know how to do this. I fundamentally do not know how to talk to you. I do not know what words or values we even share. And in this moment, as the joy of this immense victory (and defeat) begins to fade, it is this burden, the burden of repairing a divide, that we as a people are left to bear. And if it is incumbent upon me as a citizen to puzzle through this, than I wonder if it is equally incumbent upon you as a leader and a far more able man to guide your supporters toward the common ground that we as a nation share.
In the end I don't really know what a maverick is or does. But I do know what good can be wrought by one who is strong and kind and generous of heart.
I did not support you, Senator McCain. I did not vote for you and you owe me nothing, but as yet I am still your constituent and in a manner in which I would never have expected, I find myself honored to have you as a representative and public servant. I want to ask of you something both grand and tremendously simple: consider perhaps, how you may lead to that place where few may follow.
Andrew Lewis