What Today Represented

(Be warned, this is like, 2000 words.)

My dad always said that "anyone smart enough to be President doesn't want the job and anyone who wants the job is obviously not smart enough to be President." I think that changed today.

Obviously I was excited for the inauguration today. But all day I had a feeling of something, but couldn't quite put my finger on what it was. My Facebook status was (is) that I'm speechless. There was something about today that was new. It was certainly liberating to be free of the hell that was the Bush years. No longer is our government run by the people who let New Orleans drown, who bungled the intelligence leading to Iraq, bungled even worse the occupation of Iraq, forgot about Afghanistan, let bin Laden escape, think a woman's right to choose is murder, think homosexuals are committing crimes against God just by being who they are, callously ignored health care costs spiraling out of control and millions of lost jobs, awarded contracts to companies they used to own who were more interested in making a buck than having wiring good enough to not kill our soldiers while they showered, spied on their own citizens in their paranoid fear, manipulated public opinion by issuing fake terror alerts, and worst of all sank the ideal of America.

There is something about the idea of what we stand for. We're not always paragons of virtue. We've obviously done our fair share of awful things, starting with the original sin that was discussed so much today. But the idea of "all men are created equal" that is at our core. The idea that the only way to end war is to prosecute those who begin them.

In many ways, America's finest hours came in the years after the surrender of Germany and Japan. We funded the reconstruction of Europe, desegregated our armed forces, educated our veterans, greatly expanded our middle class, became the most prosperous nation on earth. But mostly, we helped establish the UN and ours was the chief prosecutor at Nuremberg. There we established the idea that wars are crimes against humanity, and those that begin them need to be held accountable. And those that participate in more obvious crimes against humanity also need to be held accountable. Genocide, the awful experiments of Mengele, forced emigration, all of these things were rightly condemned and we said never again. I think at the time, we meant it. Obviously in recent times we have failed in Rwanda and Darfur. We helped stop it in Kosovo.

But of course over the last eight years, it became so much worse than that. We became the nation that we once prosecuted the leaders of. Obviously our crimes did not descend to the horrors of the Holocaust. But they were our crimes. Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo are our crimes. Our war crimes. In the coming months and years, we're going to have to come to grips with that. We're going to rectify that situation. But that's not what I want to talk about (though I may write a full post on torture alone and why the Obama administration MUST prosecute Bush, Cheney, et al).

So goodbye to all that, to quote Andrew Sullivan. But what else did today represent? Well, for some (including myself) it represented the end of the political battles of the 60s. Whatever else you think about Obama (though if you're reading this, you're probably a fan), he did not campaign based on identity politics. It wasn't race or religion or sexual orientation that he focused on, but rather what was unifying. It wasn't re-fighting the Vietnam War and Civil Rights movement. It wasn't interested in the LBJ-Reagan argument about "big government" and "small government" but rather in good government. So I think today we said goodbye to the politics of the baby boomer generation that have so dominated our public life for forty years.

We also said goodbye to one more barrier in the long struggle against racism. Those who say that racism is over are obviously naive at best or mendacious at worst. But the number of times I heard and read from African Americans the thought that either they wished their parents had made it to see this or that now they really could tell their children that they could be anything they wanted when they grew up means that this obviously was a great step forward for us.

We said goodbye to a lot today. What, exactly, did we say hello to? What did today really represent? Well, there's the obvious. We said hello to a young, dynamic President and his brilliant (and yeah, beautiful) wife. And their absolutely adorable children.

We said hello to a Democratic working majority. I think I know what that means, but I'm not entirely sure yet. I think it means we'll get a health care bill passed. I think it means we'll get meaningful infrastructure spending for the first time since Eisenhower. I think it means we'll get some real work towards alternative energy. I don't think it means we'll get a Congress that truly exerts its authority, which it desperately needs to do.

But mostly, I think, we said hello to the chance to transform the country. It's certainly not a sure thing. A lot depends on the performance of President Obama. A lot depends on Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi having grown a spine with the landslide.

But just the chance is a new feeling. This country hasn't seen a force for liberal transformation in the oval office in 56 years. It hasn't seen a good President of any kind in 48 years. We've barely seen any truly monumental legislation in 44 years.

Maybe it was the assassinations of the '60s. Maybe it was Watergate. Maybe it was the demonization of government by Reagan. Maybe it was the routine corruption and incompetence of the last eight years. But at some point, this country lost faith in the idea that government can do good, and people who want to serve in government can be good people.

For me personally, I had no real interest in politics for the first 16 years of my life. I never really thought about it. I had vague feelings about Clinton. I never really liked him, but it wasn't a policy thing. He just seemed transparently fake to me. I wasn't really paying attention. I watched The Daily Show, got a good amount of its jokes, watched the SNL political debates in 2000, and the election coverage that night. Vaguely paid attention to the beginnings of the Bush Administration. The government was an abstraction and like my dad, not one I thought was good for much.

Obviously this is cliche, but 9/11 was the event that triggered my interest. I felt a need to understand what had happened and why. What our response was and why. And what we could do to stop such things in the future. But I wasn't quite as smart as I thought I was and supported some things that were wrong. Like the Iraq War. I said at the time I think that "if such a thing as the right war is possible, I think this is the right war for the wrong reason (WMDs)." I bought into Tom Friedman's grand theory of Iraqi democracy dominoes. It was dumb in retrospect. I knew the domino theory of communism wasn't right, I had studied history, but the appeal of democracy and the ideal of American style freedom should be more appealing...

Alas, no, I think I was wrong. So I followed the 2004 primary closely in the hopes that someone on the Democratic side would step up and rid us of George W. Bush and his neo-con friends. I wanted someone smarter than me. Specifically, someone who had been smart enough to oppose the war. I preferred Gov. Dean and was disappointed when Sen. Kerry won the nomination. I supported him anyway but somewhat lukewarmly. I cast my vote against Bush, was mystified when he pulled off the victory and continued to think politicians sucked (though I found myself fascinated enough with politics to make it my second major).

Of course, during that campaign, I watched a state Senator from Illinois on Youtube. He was running for the US Senate and got to give a speech at the convention. Which as we all now know, was a hell of a speech. It spoke about the need for unity and the end to the false divisions of red states and blue states, Democrats and Republicans. It spoke of patriotism in ways other than blind jingoism. I was excited. I did some research and it turned out that this guy had also opposed the Iraq War from the start, and what was more, gave another great speech about that, where he predicted the problems that plague us to this day.

I kept him in mind. He was my favorite for this year two days after the 2004 election. Meanwhile I watched in horror as Iraq deteriorated, the Abu Ghraib and eventually Guantanamo scandals, I watched a great American city drown, I watched North Korea test a nuclear weapon, and our justice system be perverted by Alberto Gonzales and Monica Goodling. I was fed up with politics and politicians. I despaired that we would never, really could never, have a good government again.

I thought Hillary would win the Democratic nomination. I thought Huckabee or Rudy would win the Republican nomination and knew that the best case (John McCain) wasn't really a best case at all, despite my previous support of the man. Those choices didn't appeal to me. I didn't think a Clinton administration could or would fundamentally alter the way our nation's politics worked. It would be the Clinton administration part two, though perhaps a little more liberal. Obviously better than the Bush years, but not a fundamental change.

So I'm sitting at this very computer in early January of last year. Pretty sure I was playing Civilization with my dad. But I had the Iowa Secretary of State office's website up and was alt-tabbing out of the game to check it out during every one of his turns. Slowly Obama started to climb into the lead, then he pulled away...

His Iowa victory speech was what really pulled me in. I was, at that point, emotionally invested. The New Hampshire speech in defeat a few nights later was what really pulled me in. But this was so obviously a good guy whose policies were close enough to mine that it made sense to support him, but more importantly his politics tried to not demonize the opposition and appeal to the better angels of our natures. For the first time, I thought someone I could respect was running for President. I thought government could be good again.

And that is what today was really about. The sentiment I heard over and over again was the idea that we could be proud of our government. America did something to be really proud of. We didn't just overcome another brick in the wall slavery built for us. We overcame at least a little bit our cynicism, our doubt, our hopelessness that things can get better. We were, to borrow the phrase of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright (previously borrowed by our President), audacious enough to hope.

Fundamentally, today represented the one truly American character trait: endless optimism that the world can and will be a better place. That's really what the American Dream is about. The world my children live in will be a better world than the one I did. Former President Bush nearly killed that dream in every possible way, President Obama represents to me the potential to restore it.

As for my Dad, to the best of my knowledge he never voted in a Presidential election. He voted for Obama.