"The election of an African-American to the U. S. presidency has now been rightly celebrated, and the media has begun to re-write the election narrative in order to make the defeat of racial disadvantage the critical story, thereby allowing themselves to congratulate their subscribers, the American public, for a virtuous awakening. But the fact is that while Mr. Obama gained votes on because of his race, and while race may have lost him a few votes in states already lost to moderate or progressive candidates of any race, Mr. Obama never put a racial face to his campaign himself nor did race become a central issue on its own. As former Secretary of State Colin Powell stated in a recent interview, "Mr. Obama has not run for the presidency as an African-American candidate but as an American."
Evidence suggests that Mr. Obama understood that his primary political appeal lay in his administrative competence and his even, reflective, unflappable temperament. Successful American presidents, from George Washington onward, have most often been elected and most often succeeded because of their temperament, providing that temperament matched the problems of the day. Despite the scorn that some of his opponents heaped on Mr. Obama for his background as a "community organizer," that experience gave him the capacity to sort through different ideas and opinions, to seek compromise and cooperation among disparate participants, and to squeeze the most out of a varying constituency of advisers. Mr. Obama won because he convinced the American people that he possessed the temperament to succeed with these skills. His election suggests, therefore, a return to pragmatic politics and governance.
That promise stands in contrast to the last quarter century of American politics. Beginning with Ronald Reagan in 1980, so-called conservative politics (in fact, they conserved very little) placed fixed ideological beliefs at the forefront of politics and governance. These fixed, fundamentalist beliefs included resistance to any interference in the free market, the elevation of the needs of the "economy" over the needs of "society," the encouragement of excessive individual consumerism to keep the "economy" going, and even advancement of the extremist idea that there is no public interest, no public good worth considering, not even societal interests, only the private interests of individuals and families.
Mr. Obama's election combined with the current economic crisis may allow a new politics, politics less bound by ideological rigidity. It should lead to a political environment similar to the progressive era of the early 20th century. From the late 1890s until World War I, reckless capitalism economic crises in 1893 and 1907, and the bad conduct of irresponsible corporations and business magnates, force politicians from all parties and government at all levels to seek practical and workable solutions to those problems. Those solutions sought to place the interests of the public good first, and satisfying the public good was seen to depend on pragmatic responses to changing problems. We may be entering an era infused with a similar re-discovery of society, the public good, and workable solutions. Both the current economic crisis and the new political environment suggest this may be so, and reasonable people should hope so.
It is no exaggeration to see history as the steady continuance of things as they are -- until the moment everything suddenly changes profoundly. This may be one of those moments. Ideological issues -- free market capitalism, so-called family values, anti-abortion advocacy, pro-gun rights, and other uncompromising beliefs -- did not resonate in this election. Defeated Republicans, who are already claiming that the Bush administration was the sole cause of their defeat, believe that they will be restored to their proper places in government once they have cleaned house and found a new right-wing Reaganesqu messiah to reinstall what they think are the fixed principles of unfettered, free-market economics and libertarianism. If history is a guide, they should not hold their breath.
