"US Politics Will Never be the Same"
IT was not a moment to forget in the US presidential race. A bad speech by John McCain, a spiteful and ungracious one by Hillary Clinton, and then the Democratic nominee-presumptive strode into the room radiant and luminous, the uncertainty gone from his face, and stirred the crowd as no one has done in a political speech since John F. Kennedy almost a half century ago.
Hillary made it easy for Barack Obama. She said she would make no decision on Wednesday, but there is no decision for her to make, except as to how much she wishes to tarnish her legacy by her attempts to steal the moment from the victorious candidate.
Her list of campaign accomplishments made it clear she still thinks she won -- and was asking Obama his qualifications to be her running mate. At the very least, she thinks she is leveraging the vice-presidency, when she is just aggravating the winner. This was his day, and she did everything she could to hog it. That isn't how you treat the new leader of the party.
The New York Times' intrepid Maureen Dowd caught her in the act. "As he was reaching the magic number of delegates, she was devilishly stealing the spotlight. First, her camp vociferously denied an Associated Press report that she would concede and then, in a conference call with the New York delegation, she gave a green light to supporters to push for her to be on the ticket."
It's now official: she is trying to force him to give her a moving van from her mansion off Embassy Row a few hundred metres to the (smaller) vice-presidential house at the Observatory. She wants a roll-call vote on the first ballot at the convention. She just doesn't know how quickly power shifts in political parties to the winner.
And what a winner! His victory speech showed humility in not even letting his 30,000 supporters in St Paul hear the words "We won" to a five-minute ovation. Instead they got something for all the world. We were caught off guard as his eyes fired up and with an authenticity that cannot be forgotten, welled up with his parting words that "This is our moment, this is our time." It was said with a Shakespearian passion that was contagious, and an integrity for anyone to try to belie.
For one who started working in the civil rights movement 50 years ago as a kid, when schools were still segregated and despite a Supreme Court edict, I for one could hardly believe my eyes. Despite all my shared conviction with you readers that he would win, it was still hard to believe. In 1960 even in Kentucky where I was trying to enrol black voters, whites would say "there will never be a nigger" in whatever office you wish to name. The White House? They'd have declared you insane.
An educated black woman told me African-Americans wouldn't be able to go to Harvard in her lifetime: "We're not ready for that." But just a generation later one was elected to the highest job at the highest institution of the most powerful university in the universe -- Barack Obama, editor of the Harvard Law Review. And now is the favourite to be president of the United States.
This is a sea change. Sea changes sweep away a lot of what was there before, and the politics of America will never be the same. The change is so great that everyone has to accommodate to the new power. People still clinging to sinking life rafts, like the junior senator from New York, and who are only "praised" (if fulsomely and undeservedly) because of what Filipinos call delicadeza while a safety net is thrown out to her, will soon realise how they have thrown away their credibility.
It could have been a storybook ending. The politics of old blessing the politics of new, a symbolic kissing of his ring, the passing of the torch. Well, Obama has had worse obstacles than waiting for the Clintons to get real and realise they lost and they're history. As another reporter put it, "Bill and Hillary just don't get it. They think they're still in the White House."
