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Magic
How Obama broke the dark spell and returned America to itself.
CNN’s Jessica Yellin in Chicago appeared in its New York election headquarters as a hologram last night. Over seven hundred miles away she stood there on Wolf Blitzer’s familiar set like the media equivalent of Princess Leia and told the implacable anchor of the building ecstasy in Grant Park where American history would, in a few short hours be turned inside out.
This has been an election full of magic. White Magic that only the black man from everywhere and nowhere could perform. Even his adored grandmother dying on the eve of the victory had a mythic feeling of completion to it in a candidacy full of signs and symbols. Remember the three-point basketball shot when he played with the soldiers in Kuwait? It’s as if Obama is the prince who lifts the curse in a fairy story, a curse that began eight years ago with an election wrenched away from the rightful winner and begetting as a consequence the wrathful visitation of tragedy and wars and hurricanes and economic collapse.
Perhaps the most moving image in the Chicago crowd last night was the pudgy, tear streaked face of Rev. Jesse Jackson as he held aloft his little American flag.
Last night President-Elect Barack Obama gave America back its idea of itself. Just by winning he restored the nobility of a dream that has inspired the world for 230 years. As he told us all last night: “This victory alone is not the change we seek. It is only the chance for us to make that change.” We were given that chance once in our longing for service and unity after 9/11 but what we got was a call to go shopping and we know where that took us. Even McCain seemed a different man when he conceded. Noble again. A Man of honor. The curse of this campaign has been lifted from him too.
Now can we please not risk any more catastrophes by letting this administration stick around? Just scrap the transition and let President Obama clean house right away like the Brits do at Number 10 Downing Street? In the country of my birth, the Prime Minister kisses the Queen’s hand and he’s in and the loser is on the way out with no time to make off with the silver. President Bush is still rushing through executive orders President Obama and his team (which he has surely decided as coolly as he planned everything else) will have to take months undoing. There are still agonizing weeks to wait before America can begin the painful job of putting herself back together and just by still being in the White House, I am afraid that Bush and the Death Eaters will cause some fresh disaster to fall.
Except that now if it does, we will feel better prepared to face it. Obama has been so calm and disciplined and resilient in his quest for this moment. He had to be. He was black and he has always known that one false step and he was down and out. Knocked off balance by the Reverend Wright tapes, he relied not on old style retaliation but on the power of reason and the power of words. His race speech became one of the most downloaded videos on YouTube.
His subtle guiding intelligence married to that uncanny connection to the fine-tuning of the zeitgeist made his campaign an unstoppable force before which everything fell away. The entertainment world saw it coming. This morning in the BBC Green Room, Richard Schiff, who played Toby Zeigler, the White House Communications Director on The West Wing, told me that in the 2004 series, Democratic candidate Matt Santos was based on Barack Obama. And, of course, Dennis Haysbert, who played the first President Palmer on FOX’s 24 further imagined for American audiences a black leader of the free world. Then the rest of the country caught up. You could almost feel the world spinning faster and faster in the last year, before it came to a stop in Chicago on November 4, 2008. As a new American, I pulled the lever for the first time and felt how lucky it was that it was this election I got to vote in. As I left the booth in the Catholic high school on East 56th street I felt as joyful and emotional as any Iraqi with a purple forefinger.
Perhaps the most moving image in the Chicago crowd last night was the pudgy, tear streaked face of Rev. Jesse Jackson as he held aloft his little American flag. It was all too much for him. The dream had been realized, but not by him. As he told me last August when he felt temporarily sidelined and sad: “Politics is a game of add and multiply…All the barriers went down after 50 years of battle, bloody battles and knock-out war. Obama inherited the benefits of the martyrs.” But sometimes a great leader is the candidate who embodies the dream someone else fought for. Cometh the hour. Cometh the man. Pain and pride were in Jesse’s streaming eyes. He knows we will need more than magic in the desperate struggles ahead.
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Jacob Bernstein is a senior reporter at The Daily Beast. Previously, he was a features writer at WWD and W Magazine. He has also written for New York magazine, Paper, and The Huffington Post.
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Lloyd Grove is editor at large for The Daily Beast. He is also a frequent contributor to New York magazine and was a contributing editor for Condé Nast Portfolio. He wrote a gossip column for the New York Daily News from 2003 to 2006. Prior to that, he wrote the Reliable Source column for the Washington Post, where he spent 23 years covering politics, the media, and other subjects.
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Jeff Madrick is a contributor to the New York Review of Books and a former economics columnist for the New York Times. He is editor of Challenge Magazine, visiting professor of humanities at Cooper Union, and senior fellow at the New School's Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis. He is the author of Taking America, The End of Affluence (Random House) and The Case for Big Government.
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Tina Brown is the founder and editor-in-chief of The Daily Beast. She is the author of the 2007 New York Times best seller The Diana Chronicles. Brown is the former editor of Tatler, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, and Talk magazines and host of CNBC's Topic A with Tina Brown.
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Tina Brown is the founder and editor-in-chief of The Daily Beast. She is the author of the 2007 New York Times best seller The Diana Chronicles. Brown is the former editor of Tatler, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, and Talk magazines and host of CNBC's Topic A with Tina Brown.
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Tina Brown is the founder and editor-in-chief of The Daily Beast. She is the author of the 2007 New York Times best seller The Diana Chronicles. Brown is the former editor of Tatler, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, and Talk magazines and host of CNBC's Topic A with Tina Brown.
My childhood ended when I was five, and my dad wanted me to watch the news to see firehoses blasting blacks in the South. A young white boy from the North, I cried and cried -- and could not understand why anyone would do such a thing.
I feel younger today.
This is the great day that Dr. King predicted would come, where we would cease to judge a human being by the colour of their skin, but instead judge by the content of the person's character. This was a day when people stood up to be counted and took action to repudiate injustice and inaction in the face of serious challenges.
Lovely Tina. Congratulations on your first vote. May you have many years more of voting. Love, Madalasa
"This is a day that the Lord has made. Let us be glad and rejoice in it."
Thank you TB for your thoughtful and insightful words. From the very first day The Beast went up, it has been a pleasure to have you back. And thank you and every other American for their vote yesterday. We no longer will cringe with embarassment when our new President speaks here and on the world stage and he surely will inspire us all during these upcoming challanging years ahead.
I have only ever cried like I cried last night, twice before -- when I got married and when I gave birth to my daughter.
The reason was the same -- love created something new.
We have seen what hate can do -- last night we saw what love can do.
TINA....
Never put Barack Obama and Jesse Jackson in the same sentence. Do not believe those tears.
Now, about those drapes...
But seriously, folks, do you realize what this means?
Brothers will have to pull up their pants.
Awesome article, and congratulations on your first vote. This article should be copied and printed everywhere! Again I'm prould to be able to say I'm prould of my President as well as My Country!
Now when the President Elect says "God bless America", the world will reply, with a heart felt "Amen".
We are all proud of this amazing leap of maturity witnessed today.
Well said Tina
"...the man from everywhere and nowhere."
... from the shanties Africa to the plains of Kansas.
...that land is still my home...there's no place like home.
Aloha...nice to see you.
...black father...where are you?
Aloha...see you later.
...white mother...she gone too.
Alum palling Pinky, W.E.B., T.S.E. and Yo Yo.
Chose to work with LeRoy Brown.
'that one'...second class - second city
...from everywhere and nowhere...
...is everyone and now here.
In the words of Jimmy Malone.
"What are you prepared to do?"
"Here endeth the lesson."
I have been reading The Beast since it went online and have never left a comment. As a mother of two twenty-something daughters, I have to comment now and commend all the young people who registered to vote and then followed through and voted for a man who is our bright and shiny future. I reiterate TDBBIGFAN's sentiments -- no more cringing!
Your best essay on The Beast yet, Tina. It's amazing how Obama brings out the best in all of us.
A man for all seasons, the new Thomas More has arrived!
My mom's poems for Obama before and after the election. She is white, 88 years old and lives in Arizona. Hows that for demographics!
ELECT OBAMA
YOUNG,HONEST,SINCERE,AND VITAL
HE'S GOT THE GOODS.
THE QUALITY AND CHARISMA
TO GET THIS COUNTRY
OUT OF THE WOODS
TANKA: HURRAH- ECLAT!
-------------------------------
BARACK OBAMA
FORESIGHT TO LEAD OUR NATION.
NEW WORLD SENSATION.
GET US OUT OF THIS TRAUMA.
AND, NOW AT LAST CAN SHOUT "AH"!
***
I have been a fan of yours since they used to run your column
in the Washington Post. I was thrilled to discover The Daily Beast. I'm proud to be an American today. A great weight has been lifted off the country. I've been voting since the seventies
but this is the first election that I have been really excited about. God bless us all!
"'Obama inherited the benefits of the martyrs.'"
Jesse Jackson no doubt counts himself among those "martyrs." We can only hope that Obama's election means that we will no longer have to endure Jackson and Sharpton and the whole host of self-appointed spokesmen for African-Americans who have used race to boost their personal aims.
The contrast between Jackson and John Lewis (a true hero and near-martyr) couldn't have been more stark last night. One was clearly crying for what he had lost, the other rejoicing in what his sacrifice had gained.
Tina, great piece.... we the, U. S., can no longer be referred to by European pseudo-intellectuals as, "The stupid, American racists."
Now, I want to see a BLACK queen of England... seems only fitting. Let's elect a black PM and make sure twenty percent of Parliment is of African Decent. Let's expand this grand theory throughout Europe and elect a black President of France, a black Chancellor in Germany , et al other nations of the region.....
If this doesn't happen in the next few years, then we Americans can rightfully muse, "Ohhhh, the stupid racist Europeans!"
The vote last night was against the idiot Repblicans on Wall Street, not for Obama.... that's the truth.
ScreenwriterOne
I was there last night in Grant Park, basking in the magic of history in the making. I was lucky enough to be there with my grown son, who had been a campaign volunteer getting out the vote in Indiana on election day (I myself had contributed to this campaign, the first time in my life I had ever contributed to a presidential campaign, but hadn't been able to volunteer in the campaign.)
I will never forget that perfect autumn evening in Chicago when I was part of that huge, expectant, and ultimately joyous throng--that evening when we changed the world.
Jesse Jackson's tears came from a lot of sources. His first-hand experience of the terrible suffering endured by those who fought to make this possible, and the genuine happiness, pride, and joy he must feel in being an invaluable part of the movement that brought America to where she is today. He, like all of us, must be very proud to be an American. President-elect Obama was very wise to say that this victory belongs to everyone. America did it!
A troubled country sits under the command of a failed leader...unpopular and waging war in two distant lands, with an economy crushing the populace, and despair and hopelessness having replaced the vibrant optimism of the country. The military is firmly, resolutely behind the leader, despite mounting losses and humbling setbacks in the various military campaigns. Much of the military engagement has been at the whim of the nation's leadership, a personal vendetta fueling one of the conflicts, while inept leadership has hampered the other. The country's standing worldwide has slumped, and the leader is reduced to occasional scripted appearances, with little or no interaction with the press. His unpopularity stands in stark contrast to his absolute, unquestioned power.
Time for a coup d'etat? In some parts of the world, perhaps, but in this nation, it is time for an election. Every four years we hold a referendum on the leadership of our nation, and this year, we get to turn the bums out. The problems won't all go with our outgoing president, but what a marvelous construct is our democracy. Without anyone reaching fora weapon, the most powerful man in this country, really the world, will cede his power to a person, in this case, not even of his own party.He will walk away from the highest office in the land with nary a backward glance. And in 4 years, we will consider the job done by the new president, and re-hire, or fire, him accordingly.
Watching democracy in action is breathtaking. It is easy to dismiss the quaintness of customs and traditions of a bygone era, but consider the documents and processes designed by our nation's forefathers in the late 18th century, well over 200 years ago. The mechanisms for changing power, for limiting the duration of power, and the creation of numerous checks and balances to limit that power is perhaps man's most impressive gift to the future. Sure, we will also hand over the miracle of flight, the internal combustion engine, linear accelerators, split atoms, and the thermos, but those inventions will all be upgraded and surpassed in some way. But what we witnessed last night....hard to improve on that.
And so it is, that troubled country, led by a failed president, in a single day of voting, an evening of counting those votes, and then an early morning speech by our next leader, infused with optimism and possibility, restored a measure of hope...without use of a weapon, or a drop of blood. Plenty of sweat, no doubt some prayers, and sore knuckles from knocking upon endless front doors were the tactics by which we replaced our leader. And so it has been for over 200 years, and with luck, so it will continue for centuries to come. We speak of our nation's forefathers as characters in our history books, but last night, as they do every 4 years, they were alive once more, walking amongst us.
http://critpatriot.blogspot.com/
Let the Healing and the Work begin!
Darlin'... the best words on The Beast since you put it up... so brilliant. Makes it even more easier to cherish this hangover... America is back!
Growing up in the South, the child of lower middle class parents with rural roots, I never believed the election of an intelligent, passionate African American would occur in my lifetime. It's a mark of George Bush's massive incompetence and venality that he made Barach Obama's success conceivable and maybe even inevitable. I join you in wishing for his swift departure and can only add for Mr. Bush the words I heard so often from my grandfather: Don't let the screendoor hit you in the butt on your way out!"
Thank you.
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