The Making of the President, 2008

By Charles Kaiser

"It was invisible, as always."

Hold on very tight. After a grueling journey through precincts and primaries and promises kept and unkept, we are finally eight days away from the end of the beginning.

The making of a new president in 2008 at first seemed to pivot on Iraq, and then around our suddenly-cratered economy. But beneath and beyond all that, it has always been about just one thing: Could our better instincts toward justice and inclusiveness — the modern version of the compassionate truths our founders held to be self evident — could those generous principles finally overpower the racist, McCarthyite, underbelly of America, which the Republican party has exploited so successfully for such a long time. Eight days from now, we will know.

The spirit inaugurated by John Kennedy and Martin Luther King, elaborated on by Bobby Kennedy, and propelled by the music and culture of the 1960's — that spirit felt like it had been extinguished forever by the bullets of Oswald and Ray and Sirhan Sirhan.

For those of us old enough to remember those surreal days of hope and promise, for us whose sense of possibility seemed to shrivel up forever after Bobby Kennedy was killed, it has been forty years since we have allowed ourselves to dream of a moment like this. That is why we, and our children, are so coiled with tension as we count down the hours until the day of reckoning.

I harbor no illusions about the Democratic nominee for president. Barack Obama is the greatest orator of his generation, but he is no more capable of leading us into a promised land all by himself than those fallen icons of our youth. Like John and Bobby Kennedy, he is a politician and a compromiser, the product of an urban Democratic political machine, a United States Senator who is about as radical as the League of Women voters. And yet, his election would be a landmark, and not just because it could bind up so many of the wounds still unhealed, one hundred and forty-five years after the Emancipation Proclamation.

Yes, it would be a magnificent thing for a black man to become president of the United States — and there is no reason anyone should be reticent to say that. But Barack Obama's race is not the most important thing about his candidacy.

Imperfect as he is, this Democrat's election would still be a stunning repudiation of the politics of fear and greed and know-nothingness, which began by polluting our system of government, and have ended by pushing us closer to the abyss than we have been at any time since 1930.

The new president will face more challenges than anyone in the White House since FDR. But those who doubt Obama's executive ability ignore what he has already proven, by attracting so many of the best and the brightest to his cause. If Obama can manage America half as well as he has managed his campaign, there will be real hope for all of us.

This election is not a sure thing: all the smartest prognosticators I know remain uncomfortably uncertain about its outcome. Those bluer and bluer maps on all the networks must not be allowed to breed overconfidence. Overnight is a long time in politics, and a week — especially this week — still feels like forever. But if everyone goes to the polls who still believes in America's better nature, it is possible — just possible — that we will elect another lawyer from Illinois, determined to achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.

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