So Proud to be an American!

Yes, at the risk of being blasted like Michelle Obama was, I can firmly say that I am once again sooooo proud of this country and it's all because of the great news coming out of Europe all weekend. While I was sitting here firing up my new mp3 player (yes, I dumped the old one accidentally into a bucket of soap and water - it wasn't happy) I've been playing the video clips from the Obamas' trips to London and France, listening to their speeches, never once wincing in humiliation at the arrogant hubris of days gone by.

Rather, I heard my president vow to remove nuclear weapons from the face of the earth, pledge greater cooperation and appreciation of the cultural history of our European friends and ask if the United States could join them in the fight against global warming. Wow! I heard him thoughtfully answer a student's question about the burden of being a world leader yet encourage her and her cohorts to service no matter on what scale. I saw Michelle Obama clutched by school girls of every ethnic background, making eye contact and touching each of them. (much to the Secret Service's dismay!) When she told them that each individual young lady was a "precious jewel" in her eyes, she was not the only one tearing up.
This morning's NY Times confirmed my sense of walking on air, carrying nothing but good news about the bridges that have been mended this week with Europe. It also ran two editorials, one each from the London Times and a French journal, reiterating my take that the Obamas are not just physically head and shoulders above our last administration, but morally and intellectually as well.

All that brings me to the book I just finished. Gwen Ifill's The Breakthrough; Politics and Race in the Age of Obama, which made a little stir last fall right before she moderated the pathetic vice-presidential debate. I have to admit that, unless Ms. Ifill completely rewrote this book after the election, there was no doubt in her mind as to who was going to be living in the White House come January when the book hit the streets. However, I don't believe that it ever would have caused her a conflict of interest in the debates and, in fact, I'm afraid that after all the hoo ha, it probably weakened her as a moderator. She was so afraid of being called for bias that she let Sarah Palin run the show, never going in for the kill as she certainly could have. In retrospect, it turned out fine.

Ms. Ifill is well known as a thirty year career journalist who's been there, done that and seen the rest. Don's been tivoing (is that a verb I wonder?) her Washington Week for me for years now since we're usually just sitting down to dinner when that comes on. I love politics but reading about it can often be a slow grind. Not so here. Gwen's writing style makes the material very accessible for the everyday reader. The thrust of her book is actually about the generation gap that showed through - often in a less than tasteful way - throughout the campaign, between the old guard civil rights warriors like Jessie Jackson, Sr., Rev. Al Sharpton, former Senator Ed Brooke, Vernon Jordan and Andrew Young, to name just a few, and the up and coming African American politicians who were born after the violent work of the '50's and '60's.

Ms. Ifill points up the understandable differences in the way the younger generation sees race relations in terms of votes and politics. Often working against their own families, young men like Chicago's Jessie Jackson, Boston's governor Deval Patrick and Newark's mayor Cory Booker have no illusions about race as an issue but they don't see it as THE issue and that has made all the difference. Much like the young women today who, with options abounding, don't see what all the fuss was about back in Gloria Steinem's day (they probably don't even know the name Betty Friedan), black candidates like Barack Obama have often considered themselves beyond race. It's a lovely thought but Obama found out quickly enough that it wasn't true, and though he tried mightily to keep race out of the campaign, it kept rearing its head until he had to address it boldly in the beautiful speech he gave in the city of brotherly love.

Of course, the worries of the old guard, whether civil rights leaders or Hillary's disappointed feminists, are real. Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it, it's said. If today's young women have never seen the consequences of a back street abortion, will they continue the fight for reproductive rights when they sit in the House or the Senate? Will the black mayors of our country's major cities forget the unemployed, the wrongly imprisoned, the homeless, in an overzealous effort to appeal to white America? Ms. Ifill contends that maybe we are finally at a crossroads where we in this country no longer need to take note of "firsts." Perhaps, she hopes, we have come so far that we will "cease to notice them altogether." Now that's change I can believe in!