WP, Eugene Robinson: What He Overcame

What He Overcame
By Eugene Robinson
Friday, June 6, 2008; Page A19

There will be plenty of time to chart Barack Obama's attempt to navigate a course between the exigencies of the old politics and the promise of the new, between yesterday and tomorrow, youth and experience, black and white. For now, take a moment to consider the mind-bending improbability of what just happened.

A young, black, first-term senator -- a man whose father was from Kenya, whose mother was from Kansas and whose name sounds as if it might have come from the roster of Guantanamo detainees -- has won a marathon of primaries and caucuses to become the presumptive presidential nominee of the Democratic Party. To reach this point, he had to do more than outduel the party's most powerful and resourceful political machine. He also had to defy, and ultimately defeat, 389 years of history.

It was in 1619 that the first Africans were brought in chains to these shores, landing in Jamestown. That first shipment of "servants" did not include any of Obama's ancestors; it's impossible to say whether some distant progenitor of his wife, Michelle, might have been present at that moment of original sin. Ever since -- through the War of Independence, the abolitionist movement, the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the great migration to Northern cities and the civil rights struggle -- race has been one of the great themes running through our nation's history.

I'm old enough to remember when Americans with skin the color of mine and Obama's had to fight -- and die -- for the right to participate as equals in the life of the nation we helped build. Watching Obama give his speech Tuesday night marking the end of the primary season and the beginning of the general election campaign, I thought back to a time when brave men and women, both black and white, put their lives on the line to ensure that African Americans had the right to vote, let alone run for office -- a time when Democrats in my home state of South Carolina were Dixiecrats, and when the notion that the Democratic Party would someday nominate a black man for president was utterly unimaginable....

...(A)s Obama's young supporters like to chant, "race doesn't matter." No one will be happier than I when we reach that promised land, and we've come so far that at times we can see it, just over the next hill. But we aren't there yet....

Yet the amazing thing isn't that there were instances of overt, old-style racism during this campaign, it's that there were so few....

***

Maybe there's more to come, maybe not; but already -- after 389 long years -- it's safe to say that this nation will never be the same.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/05/AR2008060503433.html?nav%3Dhcmodule&sub=AR

He's thoughtful in his exchanges....and when he's on Tweety's he barely gets a word in edgeways with Pat Buchanan butting in with his bs. When he's on with KO he really gets to speak, and I always listen.

Obama has made us proud.

because articles like one from Eugene Robinson are important for our sense of historic perspective and give me the chills.