Oldie but goodie…
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I missed Bill Clinton’s speech last night so I went to CNN and played it this morning. I loved it. The speech strengthened my commitment to vote for a Democrat rather than a Republican, to welcome Hillary’s 18 million and to leverage their work breaking down the ceiling of glass that separates white women of privilege from leadership positions reserved for their male counterparts. We can leverage that barrier-busting energy to tear down the wall of American apartheid, because while there is obviously a glass ceiling that keeps women out of board rooms and executive offices, there is also a wall that has — up until now — separated white Americans from “colored” Americans.
Over the last fifty years or so, that wall has been breached many times. Exceptional “people of color” have found places at the top of their professions, shared power with whites and helped to erode that bitter legacy of centuries of racism, of chattel slavery, of genocide as a policy for subduing the continent. Barack Obama will be one more of these, an exemplar of the meritocracy that governs success within our democracy. We must help him to succeed because he is among the best of us. We don’t owe him the shot because he is non-white any more than we owed Hillary the shot because she is female. No, we require his service now because he is prepared to initiate the policy changes necessary for a broad improvement of our shared circumstances.
Yesterday I listened to Ishmael Reed, Alice Walker, and Maya Angelou discussing Obama and the promise of his presidency. All agreed that the historical moment is significant for African-Americans, but Reed was the least up-beat. Walker has been on-board with Barack from the beginning. Angelou had a short distance to travel, shifting her support from Hillary to Barack. But like me, Reed remembers the Clintons, the 1.4 million Iraqi dead by the end of Bill’s first term, the Democrats’ support for the Unocal pipeline in Burma in 1996… the list goes on.
What’s good for the ruling elite may seem palatable in the short term, but in the long term it’s not often what’s best for the country or for the people of the world. Barack Obama is a progressive Democrat. I want to see him elected, but let’s not forget: he’s a Democrat… not a Green, not a Socialist… a Democrat. I sent him fifty bucks today. The more small contributions he receives, the less beholden he will be to the corporate power structure and the global oligarchy. The more progressive Democrats we elect, the better our chances to build a real democracy some day.
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