Chicago Sun-Times, Nov. 5, 2008
Like a lot of other people, I voted for you, although you weren’t my first choice. Actually you were my third. But as the campaign progressed I began to see how revolutionarily hopeful your candidacy was, and how wrong I had been ever to prefer anyone else.
The first thing was your brilliant style of fund-raising. American candidates normally put the arm on the biggest and richest bankrolls they can for the fattest checks, with the result that every candidate achieving election does so owing a large debt to individual persons and institutions, including such powerful entities as the National Rifle Association and (forgive me, dear wife the college professor) the teachers’ unions. All of which take care to see those debts get handsomely repaid in the currency of government favors.
But, President Obama, you didn’t do that. You raised your campaign funds primarily from individuals and in relatively small amounts. So you owe a debt too, but in so universal and diffused form that it can best be described as a debt to the American people in general.
Which is actually what every elected official is sworn to honor anyway, by the terms of his inaugural oath. So at one blow you have weakened one of the two great wickednesses in American politics, the favoritism given the rich and powerful.
Of course that is only one of the sins that besmirch our democracy. What about that other one, the power of the single-issue voter? Why, you’ve done something about that, too.
You said you wanted to be the president of all Americans, not just the ones who voted for you. That’s a pretty sentiment. It has been adopted — at least rhetorically — by just about every elected official in America since the Dutch ruled New Amsterdam, and if there is one of them that ever has put that principle into practice once elected, his name escapes me.
But look what you did, President Obama. The pastor of your church made some repellently unpatriotic remarks about the American treatment of African Americans. Others you have chosen to honor were gays or gay-bashers, liberals or conservatives, and a storm of disapproval rose against each one of them.
I am not privy to your thoughts, President Obama, but I think I see what you are doing. You are putting into practice that famous, and famously neglected, Golden Rule, “You and I disagree on some issues, but let’s work together on the others anyway, so we can jointly keep making the world a better place.” So there you have struck heavy — I hope mortal — blows against two of the most crippling evils in American polity. Don’t stop.
Even after I had come to the conclusion that you would make the best president of all the people in the field, I had some lingering doubts. You were, after all, visibly a person of color. Was it possible that the American voter could elect an African American to the highest office in the nation?
About that I kept my fingers crossed. Indeed, I think you might well have been defeated at the polls, except for two wholly unexpected factors. One was the surprisingly feckless campaign waged by John McCain (along with the appallingly snide one of his vice-presidential pick, Sarah Palin). The other was the catastrophic self-immolation of the world’s financial structures. It is these things that put you so triumphantly over the top, and if I were a religious man, I would thank God for these healing scourges.
So carry on, President Barack Hussein Obama. There is a huge job ahead of you. I don’t know how you are going to heal the festering sores of recession and corruption that are all around us — but I know you will try your very good best. And whatever tiny bit I can do to help, I pledge to undertake.
