Paul Tiyambe Zeleza
13 November 2008
(Page 3 of 3)
The fabled Republican electoral machine that had outperformed the Democrats in election after election with its Karl Rovian tactics of fear and voter micro-targeting was no match to Obama's Chicago boys. In the closing weeks of the election, save for the so-called blue-state of Pennsylvania, the Obama campaign was fighting offence in the so-called Republican red-states. Obama flipped nine of the red-states: Colorado and Nevada, and New Mexico in the West, Iowa, Indiana, and Ohio in the Mid-West, and Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida in the South. It was a rout: McCain did not flip a single blue state.
The superior organisation, steely discipline, and strategic astuteness of the Obama campaign were complimented by the charismatic leadership, soaring eloquence, and unflappable temperament of the candidate himself. As the electorate got to know him better, Obama eroded any doubt they may have had about his readiness to be commander-in-chief. Ironically, it was the more experienced and better-known McCain who increasingly appeared indecisive and unreliable as the campaign unfolded. Obama's leadership qualities became particularly evident during the presidential debates and in the thoughtful manner in which he appeared to respond to the financial crisis on Wall Street and the rumbling storms of recession. As McCain frantically shifted from one campaign gimmick to another and ratcheted up negative attacks on Obama, the latter stuck to his message of hope and his focus on the economy. Little of the mud thrown at him by the McCain-Palin campaign and the Republican National Committee in the waning days of the campaign invoking the selective and once incendiary clips of Reverend Wright seemed to rattle his self-composure, to stick on the teflon-coated Obama.
Campaigns and leaders, however good they might be are, in the end, only successful if they respond effectively to their times. This, ultimately, is the explanation of Obama's historic victory. His campaign and candidacy captured and responded to the fierce urgency of a country in transition and crisis; the shifting racial, generational, gender, and class dynamics in the ecology of American society and politics, a proud nation of over-consumption gripped by dreadful economic fears as the unregulated chickens of neoliberalism have come home to roost. There was the growing diversity and decomposition of the binary racial system noted earlier; the rise of post-boomer and post-civil rights generations, including Obama himself, who were impatient with or oblivious to the cultural wars of the 1960s; growing familiarity among whites with professional and highly successful blacks in many walks of life, and the development of less racially polarised social spaces and encounters, notwithstanding the persistence of racialised social inequalities and injustices most savagely manifested in the growth of the prison industrial complex. This is why Obama won every demographic group except for those aged 65 and older.
In short, the class restructuring of the African-American community and the society at large facilitated by the civil rights movement and settlement of the 1960s helped pluralise blackness and disentangle it from the homogenising pathologisations of segregation. This is the context that made an Obama victory possible, but also means that his victory does not entail the end of racialised class inequalities for African-Americans. His election does not herald the end of racism, some aspects of which could even increase as the wider society prides itself in its historic achievement and abandons efforts to ameliorate the historic effects and contemporary manifestations of racial inequality. In electing Obama America has indeed grown up, but a post-racial future remains a distant mirage. However, there is no denying that many whites and blacks will see themselves differently.
As I walked with the ebullient crowd from Grant Park in the unseasonably pleasant air of this historic night back to my car parked a couple or so miles away, I thought of the two other occasions I had experienced similar euphoria. The first was in April 1994, when like millions of people around the world, I sat glued to the television and watched South Africans cast the yoke of apartheid into the dustbin of history as Nelson Mandela was inaugurated as the country's first democratically elected president. The second was also in 1994, in May, when I returned to my homeland, Malawi, after seventeen years of self-imposed exile from the Banda dictatorship, to witness the country's first post-independence democratic elections, which the opposition party proceeded to win.
On those two previous occasions, like last night, the future seemed brighter than we had dared imagine only a few short years before. But the structural weight of the past soon cast its shadows on this future. The challenges ahead for President Obama are immense indeed: to rebuild the economy, repair the welfare state, heal the divided nation, rejoin the world without squandering this brief moment of global celebration of America's democratic self-renewal with imperial arrogance and misguided wars. But for now, one could be forgiven for basking in the glory of the moment, in Obama's incredible victory, in America's Mandela moment, which was unimaginable until it actually happened.
* Paul Tiyambe Zeleza is Professor of African Studies and History, Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of more than twenty books and winner of the 1994 Noma Award and the 1998 Special Commendation of the Noma Award for two of the books.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/
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reply to Kevin G Africa as a continent might be backward,but many Africans are not backward,and are better informed and better educated than many people from Europe,Asia and the Americas. You might want to do a web search on the writer of the article you are responding to and use that in testing my contention as well as measure yourself against his accomplishments.
America grows up wow just b/c America elected a black president and he happens to be of African descent has nothing to do with being grown up........ American politics is definately not run from Europe or anywhere else in the world but by Americans. I am sorry to burst your bubble but Obama is not the complete solution to America's problems or the worlds. We had problems before him and we will have problems after him. Obama is not the savior of the world and trust me Africa his focus will be on the US economy and so that does not mean more money for Africa. It is funny in how so many whites are called racists but many people love Obama for the color of his skin and has nothing too do with his politics. So many things he stands for your own cultures are so against but b/c he is black he is great, sorry no man is perfect...
America Finally Grows Up? This coming from the most backward, most ignorant continent on the planet?