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Candace
Talmadge
Read Candace's bio and previous columns
November 5, 2008
We Can Imagine It Now; We’ve Made It Happen
We buried the politics
of fear, delivering the White House to Democratic candidate Barack Obama
and resoundingly repudiating the GOP’s backward-looking agenda to
embrace the nation’s first 21st Century president.
The president-elect
responded in kind, hailing “a new dawn of American leadership,”
exhorting the nation to “a new spirit of service, a new spirit of
sacrifice,” and vowing to “heal the divides that have hindered our
progress.”
What might have
happened had Obama been president on Sept. 11, 2001? It’s a good bet
that he would not merely have urged Americans to go shopping. We
certainly would not have invaded Iraq, and Osama bin Laden might be dead
or rotting in prison. Our nation might not be up to its eyebrows in red
ink.
But that is now
history.
The crowds who stood in
Chicago’s Grant Park to celebrate Obama’s victory were multi-racial,
multi-ethnic, multi-generational. In short, they looked like the United
States of today and tomorrow. Those in Phoenix, Arizona who attended
what became the concession speech of Republican candidate John McCain
were overwhelmingly white.
In the final days
before the election, the Republicans tried every fear card in their deck
of shame. They called Obama a “socialist.” They labeled him “too
extreme” because of his former relationship with a fiery Chicago pastor.
GOP vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin continued to insist that
Obama was “palling around with terrorists.”
It was more of the
fear-mongering that so well served the Republican agenda after the 9/11
terrorist attacks.
We were unimpressed, at
long last. Instead, we lined up with the candidate who, like another man
from Illinois 148 years ago, exhorted us to look to “the better angels
of our nature” and embrace “unyielding hope.”
We need that light of
hope sorely in these dark times.
The Rev. Jesse Jackson
stood amid the Chicago celebrants, tears on his face. He stood shoulder
to shoulder with Dr. Martin Luther King in the civil rights struggle
half a century ago. Did he ever imagine that he would live to see an
African-American president?
Well, we can all
imagine it now that we have made it happen.
© 2008
North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.
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