Addis Fortune (Addis Ababa)
Tamrat G. Giorgis
1 December 2008
opinion
America is drifting to the centre, with its politics seeing the emergence of liberal republicans and conservative democrats, reports TAMRAT G. GIORGIS, Fortune Staff Writer, from Chicago. He was one of the over 4,600 journalists accredited to cover the election night party at Grant Park on the night of November 4, 2008.
The issue of 'USA Today' that came out three days after the presidential election had one of its cartoons capturing the elation stirred as an African-American is voted to become the first president of the world's most powerful country. A black woman is reading a bedtime story to her son from a book titled, "The American Dream," supposedly authored by "B. Obama," The son asked a snooping question whether it was a fairy tale she was reading for him.
"No, son," replies the mother. "This is the American history."
It was this history in the making that another boy from the Lebin family wanted to be part of on Tuesday night, November 4, 2008; an eighth grader from northern part of Chicago, Marni Lebin, 14, braved the chilly weather at Grant Park. He came to celebrate the victory of the first African-American as the 44th president of the United States. He waited, together with his sister and their father, an accountant, for hours from 3:30pm, before the park opened to the public at about 6:00pm.
This family was among those gathered in the park, and following the results broadcast live on mega screens by the CNN. They represented all kinds of people from all walks of life, although the younger generation constituted the largest number.
"I couldn't imagine being anywhere else today," Imara Kennedy, a young African-American activist for Senator Obama from Georgia, Atlanta, told Fortune. "It gives us a real sense; Obama will take us all, all America."
It was this feeling of change for inclusiveness promised by Senator B. Obama that brought the white Lebin family and African Americans, such as Mr. Kennedy, to the park that entertained over 125,000 of Senator Obama's supporters that night. None of them doubted his imminent victory. Even when the results from states such as Indiana, Georgia, and Florida - rather known as key and battleground states - were yet to come, Mr. Kennedy declared a loss for Obama was "not possible."
"I came here with visions of him in the White House," he told Fortune, before he rushed to the stage, singing and chanting, and displaying an ecstatic emotion.
Senator Obama in the White House is no longer a fairy tale or something to be imagined; it will become a reality in January 2009, when the president-elect is sworn-in as the next president. He will take with him the hopes of not only the African-American community and the 58 million people voted for him, but also many million others from other communities who did not vote for him, and hundreds of millions across the world.
"This will transform America in a manner never seen before," hopes Kennedy.
Many agree that the United States had come a long way before it let an African-American become its president. John Zogby, an international pollster and head of Zogby International, says this election marks transformation within American society because there is no longer a rebellion of the Great Depression, or the race issue of the civil rights movement. It could only be paralleled by the transformational periods known in American history, such as the time of Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan.
But, Obama is seen as a too-good-to-be-true phenomenon; though he had lost his bid for the United States House of Representatives eight years ago, he won the race to the Senate in 2004, and became president-elect last week. It is too short a political career to have claimed such office at the age of 47; a lack of experience and thin resume that was powerful ammunition for his rivals during the campaign.
But breaking barriers is not new for Obama; a product of a broken marriage, when his Kenyan father moved back to his native land, he was brought up by his grandmother who died a day before seeing her grandson become commander-in-chief of her nation. He went to school in Indonesia after his mother remarried, and moved back to Hawaii, his place of birth, and where he spent his earlier days. He studied Political Science and International Relations at the Columbia University of New York and Law at Harvard. It was here that he became the first black president of the influential 'Harvard Law Review.'
He then moved to Chicago, where he was employed by the University of Chicago, a school that finally lent its name to the president-elect: "The University of Chicago Democrat."
Obama is known as a community organizer in the black populated southern neighborhood of Chicago; one his successes were the 'Project Vote' initiative where 150,000 of the 400,000 eligible voters in the state of Illinois were persuaded to get registered to vote.
"As a young man, I remember him going from door to door and doing community works," said an African-American taxi driver from the south side.
Obama was elected to Illinois Senate in 1996. He served there for three terms, before he moved to run for the US House of Representatives in 2000. He is credited for reforming healthcare laws, increased tax credit for low-income families, increased subsidies for childcare, as well as working for stronger regulations on mortgage that aimed at discouraging foreclosures.
He resigned from the state's Senate in 2004, right after he was elected to the US Senate, and became the first black politician to assume such a place in there, receiving 52pc of the votes. But his ascendance to the prominence on national politics and capturing the attention of the American public did not come until July 2004.
He delivered a keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention in Boston, Massachusetts - John Kerry was nominated as the presidential candidate against the incumbent George Bush - and challenged the segmentation of American society with his assertion, "there is not a liberal America and a conservative America; there's the United States of America."
This was the speech that has made people like Michael (Mike) Endale, 27, a software developer originally from Addisu Gebeya, ardent supporters of the young senator.
"I've never seen a democratic candidate as inspirational as Obama is over the past 50 years," said Mark Hansen, dean of Social Sciences Department at the University of Chicago.
In the spring of 2007, when hardly anyone in the Ethiopian community in North America believed Barack Obama had any chance of winning even the primaries, Michael and his friends formed the group "Ethiopians for Obama."
Gregory Magarian, professor of Law and Election Law expert at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, is one of the analysts who believe Obama's deliverance of this speech was a defining moment for the black politician.
"People might have thought they would vote for him as a president one day," Magarian said. "But nobody thought it would be this soon."
He was challenged by a high profile Republican. After all, John McCain, 74, is a war hero admired by the American public in his credential as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, as he would not mind to break ranks with the Republican establishment.
McCain won his nomination under his centrist credential, according to John Zogby, international pollster and head of Zogby International.
There were two prominent strategists behind this election that took Obama to victory and McCain to his loss, according to Magarian.
Karl Rove, a man known to have led George Bush to two successive victories, reengineered how presidential elections are fought as far as Republicans are concerned; he developed a strategy of betting on hardcore conservative republicans largely in rural America. Instead of focusing on picking votes from everywhere, he thought of the idea of focusing on the conservative camp; he rocked them from their long slumber and energized them.
Maggi's family from near Davenport, Iowa, is one of these Americans that are the support base of the Republican Party. Deep in the vast corn growing farms in rural America, the state of Iowa is where a presidential candidate is first tested during the primary election, a process where Americans vote for a candidate from each party before the national election. Whoever losses the primary, she would have an uphill time ahead when campaigning in other states.
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