The historic essence of Abraham Lincoln and Barack Obama (Conclusion)

In the 2008 political season, it was hard not to hear the sound of America's racial history humming with the tune of the Civil War era. The primary elections smacked of subtle hangovers from the 1860's racial passions of Union states, border states, and Confederate southern states.

The Economist editorial (June 7, 08) captured the more positive mood: “For a country whose past is disfigured by slavery, segregation and unequal voting rights, this is a moment to celebrate. America's history of re-inventing and perfecting itself has acquired another page.”

But, lurching in the psycho-social of the Civil War Southerners – then and now – was the moribund “Negro question”, that is, the discomfort of the “redneck” and ageing “white traditionalists” ever suspicious of African-Americans (black folks) mingling in a common orbit with them. If the slaves were freed, they used to argue, would a white man's life, and especially “a white woman's honour” be safe? The depth that Obama is bridging today, as the highly likely 44th United States president, is a puzzling chasm wrapped in self-doubts.

Yet despite the racial twists and turns, Obama was, by far, the most historically fresh and inspiring of all the candidates – both Republican and Democratic. He was also the most articulate, and inspired. You'd discern that he'd taken a measure of the racial landscape, and especially of the characters shifting, sniffing and scrambling in it for their party's nomination. Naturally his skin had grown thick and resilient in anticipation of moods and eruptions that border on racial discomforts.

He understood the sources of white fears: not only was his own mother a white woman who loved him dearly, but also the grandparents who raised him. The African father disappeared much too early from the son's life. Many whites empathized with Obama's umbilical connection though the white single parent, but subliminal doubts continue to linger in their psyche.

Besides the nurturing, Obama's natural born qualities are solid. His gifted tenored resonance, his remarkable intellect, and his vision for a broken nation needing redemption – all joined at the hip to raise him head and shoulders above the competing pack. He was a tough act to beat. At the onset, the opponents who discerned such qualities in him bowed out gratefully and gracefully, and made room. Hilary Clinton, truly, did him a favour by hanging in and hanging him on the ropes to complete the rounds.

Ask the legendary, sting-like-a-bee, heavy weight Mohammed Ali (1960s): Champions have bruises to show. Not only did they look the visionary part, but essentially they lived it.

Good fighters come in all sexes. Together with her trainer/husband - Bill Clinton, while it might appear that they hurt Obama's chances, the tough woman toughened him for the decisive showdown against the weary warrior, John McCain.

The best things that ever, lately, happened to Obama were George W. Bush; Hillary Clinton; and John McCain, in that order. First, George Bush (a most favourite son with a president father to boot) had so estranged the U.S. presidency, and in that taint taken the entire nation to the cleaners, and dealt “the knock-out blow to our vanishing liberties” (according to novelist/essayist Gore Vidal, in his 2002 book, subtitled How we got to be so hated). The junior Bush seemed to embody, with Swiss precision, Rev Dr Martin Luther King Jr's truism that a man must be judged by the content in his character, and not the skin colour.

Mrs Clinton, in turn, had deployed her arsenal, her president husband, her steely nerve, and still come short. In the bouts against Obama, she elevated his standing and stamina in the public eye.

John McCain's multitudinous experiences seemed to be the very things that repelled Americans today. There's such a vengeful method in the recurring administrative failures, both domestically and abroad, that “experience” had lost its glow, and become expressive of that double despair. What's new? The voters wanted to know.

Ignore Obama at your own risk

All said, you could simply not despise Obama or dislike him without psychic difficulties or risks. It was in good taste to enjoy a sip to a toast appreciating a cool, multi-cultured man. His eventual victory will be a celebration not for America only. After two terms of wretched alternatives visited on friends and foes alike – vis-à-vis dumb wars, mutually destructive fears and impulses, rising oil and food prices - America is ready to redeem its “Ugly American” image, and heal. The country simply cannot blossom on this self-inflicted axis of danger and misery.

For the crowds that surged to hear him, hope and assurances were not lacking from the man they came to see. Obama’s gifted delivery and spontaneity produced their impressions rather by inspiration than by persuasion. In time, though, he will have to merge vision with action to prove his mettle. There will be many rivers to cross.

For the good of America, the pearls of diplomacy and peace must not be cast in infamy. “The glory of a nation is a desirable thing,” mused John Maynard Keynes; but he added the caveat: to be obtained at the cost of another country’s demise? Before resigning from the Peace Conference at Versailles (1919) after World War l, Keynes, distraught, foresaw the beginnings of a muscular avenger, an Adolf Hitler.

In international affairs, the raw formula of re-arranging and stacking the balance of power in one’s own interests only, will result in one thing only – a perpetual bull-fight, with wars and nuclear threats as prizes. Might and power - in all their glitzy majesties and explosive pomp - hang on a string, and are never arraigned more pristine than peace.

That the arguments supporting the invasion of Iraq were misleading beforehand, and wrong on the weight of the evidence afterwards; and that the deadly sham was deployed by none other than leaders of powerful democratic nations and their media – gives one pause. Such lusty dances can no longer go. Power brokers ought to discern, in good faith, “the sorry look of a grand bird without the feathers that make it grand” intimated by Thomas Hardy in 1874.

Policies based solely on one’s own imperial image worked in the short haul only, especially where the disguised crusts cracked, and oozed greed and racism. This, of course, Obama must know to the brim, and guard against. What “colored” person in America is naive of the “strange fruits” of bigotry?

Just like the honest Abe Lincoln, Barack Obama stood today, with one foot in the past and the other knee-deep into the future. In his book, The Audacity of Hope, Obama remembered Abraham Lincoln for the “unyielding opposition to slavery and his determination that a house divided [a nation half slave half free] could not stand.”

For a more perfect union, the saga of America’s racial history continues. Will we see the final eclipse? The jury is out. But the good news resides with the youth: Not since President John F. Kennedy (1961 - 1963) has any American leader achieved the star status of Obama.

“Why cry to me? Look to the children.” said the Lord. The screaming, ebullient crowds ever poised to welcome Obama confirmed that if America’s voting age were lowered to 16 years (it is now 18), he would win by a landslide. Not many students in America’s high schools and colleges would not root for Obama. This splendid defiance, thankfully, celebrates America’s racial future.

Author: Anis Haffar [email: [email protected]]