It is difficult to believe that, after nearly two seemingly endless years, this electoral free-for-all is finally coming to a close. The polls have Barack Obama up, cracking 50 percent almost across the board, with the sputtering McCain campaign likely to lose in recent Republican strongholds as Virginia and Ohio.
And yet, there is much consternation among Obama supporters, like my friend Bill, who has been riding the Obama bandwagon since it left the garage back in the day. Here is what he wrote me today:
Why do I feel that Obama’s situation is like that old plate spinning from the old 50’s TV shows, if he can keep them spinning until election day (5-8 points up) then he gets an electoral landslide, but if he doesn’t …..
Or this mixture of hope and despair from Pierre Tristam, of the Daytona News-Journal:
But there’s still Tuesday. Whatever the polls say, I’ve spent the last three months lurching between hope and despair, usually a few dozen times a day. I can’t help it. I’ve always taken presidential elections personally, because whoever is president disproportionately defines the nation’s identity, and therefore mine as an American. It’s an identity I cherish more protectively than whatever is left of my ancestry or the family and creed I was born into, which were never a choice.
Being an American is, and proudly so, though for too many of the last 30 years the blare of conceit and belligerence, the offensive divide between “worthy” and “unworthy,” “loyal” and “disloyal,” even “legal” and “illegal,” made pride in this country more difficult, and certainly less just, than it should be. It’s different this time. The belligerence is receding. The noise is dying. The pride isn’t — pride in a country that could produce a candidate as radically at variance with the nation’s tainted history yet as perfectly representative, as perfectly American, as Barack Obama. An America so divided couldn’t have pulled it off.
An America on the mend very much could, because it’s what the country at its best has managed to do. This is the America of my dreams. On Tuesday, I hope that it’ll be no fantasy. I despair that somehow, it may yet be.
It’s been a long time in the desert for progressives. An Obama victory doesn’t guarantee our coming home, but at last it gives us a chance to — maybe — sit at the table.
Hank Kalet 