Robert L. Terrell

The emergent, tidal wave of support white America is bestowing on Barack Obama deserves comment. Having closely monitored U.S. presidential campaigns for more decades than I need here address, I feel qualified to register these opinions on this amazing, totally inspiring, history-making event. Obama’s recent victory in Iowa, accomplished with solid, take-no-prisoners white support, projected him, for this moment, into the lead position in the Democratic party’s segment of the campaign for command of the White House.

Democrats across the nation are transfixed by the hotly contested campaign underway between Senators Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John Edwards. The drama is made more intense because the stakes are so absolutely high. Given the prevailing aura of corruption, intellectual fatigue and catastrophic, dishonorable failure which surrounds the Bush presidency these days, among Democrats the smell of victory is wafting through the air around them in strong, and increasingly intoxicating doses. Barring catastrophe, they feel much assured that the next president will be a Democrat, armed with a mandate for change. The problem is that members of the party and their supporters are also faced with the excruciating dilemma of picking one of the top three candidates. Each of them has significant strengths and consistently noticeable weaknesses.

Clinton’s inability to be flexible and nimble in her oratory and thinking is a weakness. Edwards has a tendency to be a bit shrill, somewhat preachy, and too narrowly focused. That’s a weakness. Obama is more spacey than is probably going to turn out to be good for him, and the rest of us. And that certainly is a weakness. These factors notwithstanding, in the real world in which the drama is unfolding, each of the three is an ideal candidate. Moreover, it is probably true that each of them is as good and inspiring a candidate as any political system anywhere in the world might expect to produce during a given generation. That is why Democrats, if not the nation as a whole during this relatively early phase of the campaign, are experiencing acute anxieties that verge on being an existential crisis.

On the one hand, it is the best of times. The end of the highly detested Bush era is in sight. In addition to the White House, Democrats are poised to win commanding majorities in the House of Representatives and the Senate. The “Happy Days” that Democrats always sings about during the waning moments of their National Conventions are clearly apparent on the near horizon. Nonetheless, on the other hand, however the campaign drama unfolds, two of the three smart, dedicated, committed, good and deeply inspiring top candidates are going to be profoundly rejected by the party. In the wake of the results registered in Iowa, my intuition is that Hillary Clinton has missed her moment. The timing and climate are not right for her to win this year. That is a shame because she as finely prepared to be President as any woman can expect to be in the United States at this time.

The same intuitive take suggests that John Edwards, who is arguably stronger across the board on all the most important issues than Clinton or Obama, is the right man with the right message running at the wrong time. I assume that Dennis Kucinich and Bill Richardson know what I am talking about. Any one of the three of them has a record, message and charisma more than adequate to make them a serious, viable candidate in most years. The point to be grasped is that 2008 is apparently shaping up to be Barack Obama’s year. Those who witnessed his victory speech in Iowa know what I mean. It was one of those moments when dreams and reality become synchronous. As Barack spoke to the crowd of flushed, smiling white faces, the “Dream” so eloquently set forth by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. at the 1963 March on Washington came closer to becoming our shared reality.

That’s why people had tears in their eyes. Obama’s victory was too good to be true. Moreover, everyone aware of the long, tortured struggle that the nation has engaged in for centuries in its efforts to get the race issue correct understood the incredibly positive significance of the moment. If Barack is indeed elected, everything will be different. Most important, if he is elected white America will have been substantially, and profoundly liberated from the putrid carcass of racism. Though the matter is almost never publicly discussed in this manner, new ways of thinking, being and believing will become immediately available for everyone. The positive impact on domestic and international affairs, and the positions the United States takes regarding such matters, will be astounding. Among whites, the young see these possibilities for transformation and rebirth most clearly. And that is why they are lining up across the nation to support Obama. Having worked closely with young, white Americans for almost 40 years, I believe I understand what they are about regarding this particular matter.

Many of them have been searching a very long time for an opportunity to formally renounce everything associated with the destructive, and largely illegal, heritage of white racism, including the complicated, convoluted benefits, and the dispiriting, crippling behaviors and compromises it demands of those trapped, by choice or unfortunate circumstances, in its putrid embrace. Like young whites in South Africa, who were faced with a similar choice when Nelson Mandela was released from his decades-long imprisonment in Robbin Island Prison, they want to get on with the changes that everyone knows must be made. Thus, for a growing number of young, white Americans, Obama’s campaign is engendering the infectious conviction that he is the man, this is the time and they are the critical change agents needed to move a fundamentally reformed United States along new, non-racist pathways into this new, unformed century. From this perspective, as astounding it may sound, Barack Obama is their Abraham Lincoln.

All this is terribly complex, but for those deeply familiar with U.S. culture it is absolutely profound. A change of historic importance is underway, and by the time it becomes fully manifest the United States is going to officially be a different kind of nation; more open, confident, flexible, egalitarian and socially integrated. However one might imagine success for Hillary Clinton or John Edwards, it does not, and cannot, include a dimension that engenders anything remotely similar to the transformative options that inevitably would be unleashed if Barack Hussein Obama is elected president of the United States of America.

Obama may not make it. But everyone need note that white America has officially gotten a taste of the freedom associated with what it would mean for them, and the rest of us, if he is elected. Moreover, it is clear than tens of millions of them are beginning to show signs of being moved to the core of their souls. The last time I saw people exhibiting similar political and social enchantment, they were participating in Civil Rights marches in Atlanta, Georgia during the 1960s singing “We Shall Overcome.”