I was struck, watching the wide and varied coverage of Barack Obama’s inauguration today, by one particular segment on “The News Hour with Jim Lehrer” on PBS.
Gwen Ifill was interviewing people on the Mall who’d come to witness the event. One person she talked to was an African-American woman named Eugenia Pete, from Tulsa, Oklahoma. Ifill asked Pete why the day was so emotional for her. “I have a little boy,” Pete told Ifill, fighting back tears. “He can—he can do what he wants to do. He don’t have to be just a rap star or basketball player, you know? He can do it. The sky is truly the limit now.”
That was, for sure, the predominant lesson and take-away of the day. That Obama’s victory meant that any person in America … of any race … could now realistically dream of being anything. Including President. But there’s another lesson in Obama’s victory that Eugenia Pete might also do well to share with her son. And that lesson relates to how Obama managed to accomplish such an improbable goal.
For whatever else it may have been, Obama’s journey was surely no conventional career path. Even if he had asked members of Congress or former Presidents about how to become President himself, none would have suggested the road he took—or the timeframe in which he decided to operate. The path he took to the White House was an uncharted one he blazed himself, combining audacity with rapid improvisation and course-corrections at every step along the way. So an equally important lesson of the day might be: look what you can accomplish—even against tremendous odds—if you have the courage to chart your own destiny and step away from the conventional wisdom of others to pursue what you truly believe is important and right for you to do.
I personally yearn for the day when a man’s racial and ethnic background are not regarded as his most important attributes. If I personally have good hopes for Obama it is not because of his racial background — which by the way is obviously mixed — but because he comes to the Oval Office with some new ideas. Not that new ideas are necessarily better ideas, but they tend to go with an independence of miond that is likely to find the right mix of the new and the old to do us some good. I think Obama has shown signs of that kind of independent mind, and I pray that he continues in the same vein.
Politics is such a chancy and uncertain game, and if y9ou want to be President — a much overrated aspiration, I would say — your main hurdle is to get nominated by a major party. There is not just one conventional wisdom on how to bring that about, but many. Abraham Lincoln got nominated partly by letting his campaign manager run things, including deals with competing camdodates/ When I read some of the details I was shocked == hey, this is our rupreme national hero that had to do that — but that is how it was. Some very good men, like Henry Clay for example, never made it to the White House althoug Clay was certainly more deserving than some who did make it in those days. Where did he go wrong? Impossible to say.
But “most deserving” is putting the wrong foot forward. We need to get away from the idea that we should elect our “most deserving” to the White House. What we need in a Prewident is not saintliness but the ability to make the country prosper — that’s prosper in a broad sense, not just economically.