Boztopia.com

We’re still a day away from what is going to be the most momentous presidential election in modern American history, and already, all ideologies across the spectrum are casting aspersions on the transformative nature of the change we face. From the right–excuse me, the mysterious, mystical “center”– we have wankers like Doug Schoen claiming that Obama’s election should not be a mandate for Democrats, and they’re best served by getting along and playing nice with Republicans.

On the left, we have the estimable Alexander Cockburn reminding us how utterly establishment and mainstream Obama is, and how his backers and values will prevent any real change from taking place–that he is, in effect, just a tool of the Man.

And from the corporatists, we have Big Coal and Big Telecom companies pissing in their pants over the thought of a governing body with some actual teeth behind it, begging Obama to not hurt them.

The truth, as always, lies somewhere in between all these competing narratives. For me, it was found on Saturday at a small Obama rally in Alexandria.

I attended a rally held at the Van Dorn Town Center, where approximately 50 or 60 dedicated Obama supporters met up to hear the Mayor of Alexandria, the local Obama organizers, and actor/director Mario Van Peebles (yes, he of “New Jack City” and “Posse” fame) speak. MVP gave a brief but passionate speech about how galvanizing this was for him, both as a Black man and as a Hollywood guy, to get out there and see the change he’d dreamed of come to life. The most powerful thing he said was that he’d happily be one of those people paying higher taxes under Obama if it meant his kids could have a better future.
The audience–mostly Black, with smatterings of White, Hispanic, and Asian–cheered and screamed passionately.

Did you ever think you’d see something like that take place in America, where hating taxes is ingrained into our DNA? I certainly didn’t. It fired up my buddy Drew and I to go out and canvas the nearby apartment complex for a few hours, where we got several confirmed votes for Obama, Mark Warner, and Jim Moran across the board. When we came back–at 8pm, already long past dark–the poor field organizers were still busy tallying away everyone’s canvas records and tirelessly working on voter confirmation totals to determine who to contact next.

This, I think, is the root core of what has made Obama such a transformational candidate. It’s a combination of several things:

1) The sheer symbolic power of his presence as not only the first Black man to be elected President, but that he is such a superhumanly gifted orator with such a simple, strong clear message. Obama can make skeptics ranging from myself to Matt Taibbi believe in him. The cultural zeitgeist, every so often since the dawn of time, produces someone who is absolutely capable of managing the tectonic shifts in societal development and positioning themselves as the arbiter of a new age. Like everyone from Joan of Arc to MLK before him, Obama is that man, though I certainly hope his power doesn’t end in bloody martyrdom.

2) His policies combine a mix of sweeping promise and incremental change. Like John Rogers, I laugh at people who call Obama socialist, given how utterly middle-of-the-road many of his policies are. But it’s a sign of how much the right-wing conservative machine has shifted the discourse window of the last thirty years that people think a fairly middling tax increase and health insurance for kids can be considered raising the hammer and sickle. But this is how Obama does things, and it’s how he’ll do things as president. Small steps, a bit at a time, equal large changes. You get Lily Ledbetter, the Employee Free Choice Act, and SCHIP passed (all of which Obama will be able to do with a Dem majority in both houses), and you’ve strengthened working women, unions, and the push for national health insurance in the first hundred days–who can argue that those are the first steps toward some truly progressive policies?
Suddenly, energy independence, broadband investment, and the like don’t seem so costly or hard to achieve.

3) The combination of his absolutely phenomenal ground game with state-of-the-art Internet networking tools, giving people the power to contribute to the campaign in their own way, on their own time, and at their own pace. Of course, there are a huge number of people working 12-13 hour days under hellish conditions, and that takes its toll–but it’s just as much about the people who used Obama’s tools to canvas on a weekend, or made phone calls a few hours a day. These tools and training have given people the power to literally shape the destiny of the country, something they thought was forever taken from them in the darkest depths of the Bush era. You can’t cork that genie back up in the bottle. These people have gotten a taste of activism, and just as the netroots rose to prominence and power in 2002-2004 to act as a bulwark against the worst excesses of Bush, the next phase has arrived, and they’ll want a place at the table.

4) Of course, Obama (or any candidate) wouldn’t be doing nearly as well without eight years’ worth of disaster, despair, and destruction to campaign against. If Bush had succeeded at even one thing, that might’ve made this moment of change more difficult, but when you tally up all the abuses of power, all the corruption, the billions of dollars and thousands of lives wasted, and the sheer spectacle of how debased the country has become under Bush’s reign, it seems inevitable. Not to mention how his supposed opposition, John McCain, has made a trainwreck of the Straight Talk Express at every turn, and turned what could’ve been a worthy contender to the throne into a freaky sideshow. I remarked to Drew on Saturday that McCain was giving up on GOTV and buying more media time because that’s the only front he can fight on. The media, the Beltway blowhards, and the nervous nellies who pollute our mainstream discourse are McCain’s base, and watching them squirm as he has lurched from failure to failure has been a beautiful sight.

All of these factors have combined to give us a transformational moment in our history, and an appropriately transformational candidate to lead us there. But the battle is far from over. On November 5th, we’ll still have an economy in recession, two wars costing us billions in wasted lives, moral capital, and money, and a decaying environment and infrastructure. Obama symbolizes the beginning of the transformation, not the end. It is incumbent on us–each and every one–to do our parts to make that transformation possible. Obama may be opening the door, but we have to walk through it. That means holding Obama accountable to every one of his promises. It means becoming a more active, informed, and empowered citizen who pays attention to the workings of government and fights for the powerless against the powerful. It means not letting the idiots on Faux Noise tell you what is true when it’s clear they don’t even believe it.

Here I take a cue from the beautiful words of Nezua, who wrote this on the night before the dawn of a new day:

Let us come together now and carry this beautiful energy and philosophy that is rising, and let us carry it into all corners of this land. And all lands, while we are dreaming and hoping and planning. Let us first and finally begin to banish these ghosts wringing forth blood from our souls and truly be(come) that New America that we now dare to dream of en masse.

For your friends, your families, your country, your people, and your future. Let us go forth and make history together, transforming the country and rebuilding the dream for each and every one of us.

I know that
All that we want is to feel inside
Some kind of comfort
And all that we’ve done
We can hide
We’ll be the best in the world
We’ll be the best in the world

–”Just Stop,” Disturbed