Everything Magically Better Now

I'm seeing a lot of people celebrating. Mostly via Facebook status updates, a sign of the times if ever there was one. There's nothing wrong with a party; this is America, a nation we celebrate once a year by setting off deafening, eyeball-searing fireworks displays. The happy people we saw on TV last night have every right and every reason to hug each other and wave flags and weep.

President-elect Barack Obama has his work cut out for him, and he surely thrusts into it knowing he will undoubtedly disappoint quite a few people, ironically the same people who most fervently supported him. This is not his fault, it's the fault of simple human impulses that lead us to disappointment, disgust and despair. Not since "Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace" has a momentous event arrived with so much hype and anticipation behind it. Obama's one-step-behind-the-Messiah, cultlike popularity worked beautifully on the campaign trail. The problems start when people expect him to turn water into wine in his first hundred days.

By a similar token, those of you who chose to make George W. Bush their whipping boy for the past eight years (you may well have even voted for John Kerry, evidently largely on the grounds that he wasn't Bush) will all of a sudden not have George W. Bush to kick around any more. He'll probably retire to Crawford, do speeches for conservative-leaning events, maybe write a book. Now, American political tradition dictates that the new President gets to blame his first few years' troubles on the previous administration. But nonetheless, instead of a whipping boy in office, you'll have a golden boy. And God help this country if the gold tarnishes even one bit or we'll have real trouble on our hands. Can Barack Obama's reputation create a rock so big that even he cannot lift it?

We can take comfort in the fact that, though he cannot live up to the image created for him, he will also not ruin America in the increasingly unlikely manners currently being discussed on FreeRepublic by frightened racists. (I highly recommend reading these exciting Internet posts, incidentally; they're even funnier than all the disappointed Kerry supporters from four years ago. All the same drama-queen whining and uninformed doomsday prophecies but now with bitter selfishness and rank unoriginality thrown into the mix.) So rest assured this essay will have little to say about socialism, race riots, vague Islamic threats or the destruction of the Earth by fire. I hate to take a page from "South Park"'s occasionally infuriating fence-sitting, but the truth is, well, somewhere in the middle.

A few words of caution, then.

Barack Obama will not deliver on every promise of his campaign. His administration will not give this country each and every one of the great things he promises in his speeches or on his beautifully designed Web site. This will not mean that he has sold out, or betrayed his principles, or caved in to the vast right-wing conspiracy. Nor will this mean that democracy has failed, that the DNC manipulated him or that we were duped by just another politician. It means that not everything in life goes according to plan. Why, sometimes it's good for a little post-election shift to occur. Just remember the Clinton years; an essentially centrist President with a largely conservative Congress, and presto, the good old days.

Barack Obama will not solve the current economic crisis. He will do things to make it easier for those affected, and he will encourage changes in the system. But the problem is too big, too complex, too alive for a government to solve. Certainly the conventional methods are of no use to us here. (FDR was a great President, yes, but it still took World War II to end the Great Depression. This should not be taken as a request for World War III, which your correspondent feels would present its share of problems.) What a politician running for office can't tell you is that this crisis is its own entity. It extends as wide as foreign nations and as deep as the very soul of America. It is convenient and easy to cast blame, and it is convenient and easy to look to your government with pleading eyes and scream "Improve my lot in life," but this is like deploying a computer virus to stop an elephant stampede; it's not that the force is powerless in and of itself, it's just that it doesn't have much impact in the other's sphere.

Barack Obama will not be the undisputed king of the government. We tend to mentally assign, I think, more legislative significance to the President than he actually gets on paper. Let us not forget Obama's agenda will also have to get past five hundred and thirty-five Senators and Congresspeople, the vast majority of whom will be the absolute scum of the earth. Obama himself is-I cannot stress this strongly enough-a genuinely honest and moral person with the people's best interests at heart. This will not spread by osmosis to the rest of your federal government, which at last count was comprised largely of a hateful assortment of slugs and whores.

Barack Obama will not serve as the death knell of "politics as usual", by the same token. He has reached across the aisle and made friends in both camps. He has proven the viability of selecting a candidate based on things that matter, rather than on second-guess choices by committees driven by fears of electability or otherwise sticking to a terrible plan. He has shown the Republican Party that there is no longer a place at the table for theocratic neoconservative fearmongering and that people will seek true fiscal conservatism from whoever will give it to them; he has shown the Democratic Party that a campaign can be run and won on hearts and minds without diminishing the issues and that people are looking for genuine leadership to lead them to the light. All this is good, but there is no guarantee that these lessons will actually take hold, unless we show with our future votes that they ought to, for the parties' sake. Some people just won't be told. Eight years from now we may well be back to voting for our preferred lesser of two evils and looking back with nostalgia on the happy days of Obama, Reagan or unicorns. That doesn't depend on Obama. (Or unicorns.) That depends on us.

Barack Obama will not signal an end to racism in these United States. There will remain a disheartening number of people in this country who simply don't like black people. Some African-American scholars even warn that an Obama presidency will actually encourage institutional racism and make people less vigilant about combating the ugly specter in everyday life, allowing us to become complacent, to figure that, hey, if one grew up to be President, problem's solved, the rest ought to attend to their bootstraps. The sad fact is that many people, some of whom voted for Obama, just don't like black people. Prejudice runs deeper than political affiliations; if that wasn't the case, blue-state California's Prop 8 would have been laughed out of existence before the ink dried. Oh, there will, to be fair, be fewer racists around come next Election Day... because four years' worth of them will have gotten old and died. The rest will have to be put up with in the usual manner.

We are informed and intelligent citizens who know that Barack Obama has more to offer than a thirty-second spot and a clever speech. We know that the arrival of a genuine game-changer in Washington is not a prize for victory, but merely a ticket for admission to the next round. We understand that the tone of this country is set from the bottom up, not the top down, and choosing the blue Jell-O shot over the red Jell-O shot at a party does not alone qualify you as an agent of reform. We are prepared to do the work it takes to have whatever "change" we wish to believe in, because it doesn't just come from convincing other people to vote for a guy who will do it for us. We are ready for whatever this means, not as Obama voters, but as Americans. And if we aren't, we become the indignant tourist who pisses in the ocean and swears a blue streak when it doesn't all turn yellow.

The man said it himself: it will be hard work. The "it" refers to whatever you want it to be. We've placed our bet, we've chanted the slogans, we've even joked about drinking the proverbial Kool-Aid. Now we have a man who will govern not from an ivory tower but merely an attractive white building. We have between now and one historic day in January now to reconcile lofty visions with harsh realities. They are not, despite what fearmongers may have you think, at odds with each other. They are not different dimensions but different languages. If we do not grant President-elect Obama the berth he requires, and give of ourselves the emotional and political capital he reminds us we have in the first place, we will have lost sight of Obama's trees for the forest, chosen an empty shell, and the results will be no more for change than whatever we wanted a change from.

What was it Churchill said about democracy? It's the worst form of government, except for all the others. Once again the people got what they wanted. And even the most fervent "Nobama" voter will freely admit that Obama was elected by the people, of the people; no President of the modern era can boast his independence from lobbyists, from corporations or whatever other odious forces you can name. Cynics among us will be forgiven for wondering if the people are ready for such responsibility.

I'm reminded now of the old line about one group chasing another group-dogs chasing cars, little boys chasing little girls-the question of, if you caught one, what would you do with it. Barack Obama was worth the chase. Let's hope America knows what to do with him.