June 3, 2008: Barack Obama Makes a Different Kind of History

I'm watching CNN right now. I felt a profound moment of history earlier as Wolf Blitzer announced that Barack Obama had won enough pledged delegates to secure the Democratic presidential nomination:

Sen. Barack Obama has clinched the Democratic nomination for president, according to CNN estimates, making him the first African-American in U.S. history to lead a major-party ticket.

Obama picked up a slew of superdelegate endorsements on Tuesday. Those endorsements, combined with the delegates he's projected to receive from South Dakota's primary, will put him past the 2,118 threshold, according to CNN estimates.

Obama will claim victory during a speech in St. Paul, Minnesota, according to prepared remarks released by his campaign.

"Tonight, I can stand before you and say that I will be the Democratic nominee for President of the United States," he's expected to say.

Obama's achievement is personally bittersweet for me, a victory that feels enormously anticlimactic, if not ominous.

I recall in 1988, as a young Democratic Party idealist, I watched Jesse Jackson's "Common Ground" address to the Democratic National Convention. I thought Jackson said more about the fundamental issues facing the country than any other candidate in the race that year.

While I did not like Michael Dukakis, I believed George H.W. Bush to be an American patriot and a fundamentally decent man. Yet, above the two, I felt that Jackson's eloquence rose to the heights of the great civil rights leaders of the past - even to the standards of Martin Luther King, Jr. After the Reagan years, its seemed to me - as a young man - that the country was moving too far to the right, and that the concerns of the disadvantaged were being swept aside in the tide of a morning-in-America political realignment.

When G.H.W.B. was elected, I saw him as my president, my national leader (there was no demonization of the enemy in my heart), and I believed the country was in good hands - and that perhaps indeed a "kindler, gentler" America might pull back from what many argued was the "greed-is-good" phenomenon of the earlier decade.

But in 1992, after the recession of the time, when many people spoke of an "economic depression," I welcomed the "pulse of morning" that was the promise of William Jefferson Clinton.

Yet by the end of that decade I felt betrayed. The man who had evinced so much vitality and hope, who showed that anyone in America might succeed and attain the most powerful leadership position in the world, betrayed the stature of the office through the dirt and dishonesty of a sexual liaison with a young White House intern.

When Al Gore lost the presidency to George W. Bush in 2000, I was not bitter. I saw the Supreme Court's decision in Bush v. Gore as legitimate, and I expected that the Democrats would have a shot at returning to the presidency in 2004.

But then we were attacked, on September 11, and for all my shock of the violation of the American mainland, I did not view the war on terror in partisan terms - I believed deeply that the country would rally to a cause greater than the individual, that the fabric of unity in nation would guide us to meet a larger challenge than anything my generation has faced before.

But that did not happen. Hard-left partisans showed little if any support for our deployment in Afghanistan, and I learned the hard way the true nature of the domestic fifth column, in seeing the anti-American attacks on the United States, with calls for "a million Mogadishus." I personally spoke out, at campus "war forums" (actually, antiwar rallies), in solidarity with the Bush adminstration on regime change in Iraq. Since that time I've never wavered in my support for the deployment nor for our troops in the field. Over the past five years, as even some of the most eloquent war supporters threw in the towel, or leaned close to admitting defeat, I never lost hope that our cause was right and just, and that the United States would prevail.

Instead, I have been radicalized by the radicals, and in my teaching and blogging I've resisted - forcefully and relentlessly - the antiwar nihilism on the left, and I have held firm in my unflinching belief that Americans would win, that our troops would take it from Baghdad's Euphrates to the streets of Basra and Fallujah, that we would fight, in the alleys, in the fields, and on the pockmarked highways of death, with their improvised explosive devices. We would never surrender.

So, now, on June 3, 2008, I feel this moment in history has no greater significance than a validation that we have indeed overcome. Today is, more importantly, unlike the day, on June 6, 1944, that Americans embarked on the D-Day invasion of Europe, to liberate the continent from the grips of Nazi totalitarianism. Americans then were united in the cause of a world free of the jackboots of oppression. And we did emerge victorious then, through ups and downs, through setbacks and near defeats, to end the spread of Nazi expansionism and genocide.

I do not see that kind of history in the electoral campaign today. The Democrats today are the party of defeat, and as the netroots hordes have beaten the drums of ignomious retreat, the contenders for the party's nomination have pandered remorselessly to the hell that is far left-wing Bush-hatred, Lieberman derangement, and Israel-bashing anti-Semitism.

The country that the left identifies as the contemporary manifestation of world evil is not the world in which I live. The country denounced as a hopeless abomination of hatred and repression is not the nation to which immigrants from around the world scratch and kick to make it to our shores, to join the great democracy that is the last best hope of freedom. That world that the left identifies as an unmitigated evil is foreign to my identity and sensibility, to my ideal of America as the bastion of universal opportunity.

No, June 3, 2008, is unlike that day, almost sixty-four years ago, when our people had a purpose. I see in Barack Obama, in his claim that "this is our moment," as pulling the country irretrievably into a netherworld of amorphous "change," hand-held by the soulless armies of 60s-era radicalism, and by the domestic bombers and black liberationists who populate the flag-crushing backwater of far left-wing multicultural jacobinism.

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have now given their speeches. She won't concede, while he calls for a new America of ambiguous "forward movement" to some of partisan transformation.

So, in this historic moment, while I'm genuinely astounded in this nation's ability to open the doors of oppportunity to those who for so long were oppressed under the weight of real racist reaction and gender discrimination, there is little inside me that suggests we are seeing a new Reaganite affirmation of a "city on a hill" or a Clintonian promise of a new "pulse of morning." Instead, it seems that Obama and his hordes represent the new vanguard of the proletariat, who will seek to move this country far away from its historic roots in a political culture of anti-aristocratic egalitarianism and individualism, to a neo-collectivist regime, with higher taxes, regulation, and anti-Republican war-crimes prosecutions at home, combined with foreign policy surrender and unconditional diplomatic appeasement abroad.

That's my take on things. As always, I'll have more later.