To join that ebullient crowd in front of the White House shortly after midnight on Tuesday was to dance with history. “Bush out now!” and “Goodbye, na na na na”, they chanted, to the sound of drums. “Obama! Obama!” Car horns honked. Most of all, though, these mainly young revelers chanted the slogan that Obama had just made the leitmotif of his acceptance speech in Chicago: “Yes We Can! Yes We Can!” Even the car horns took up the three-stroke rhythm: beep-beep-beep. When I went to bed, well after two in the morning, I could still hear the chants reverberating up to my hotel window. Yes-We-Can! Yes-We-Can! But can they? Can he? Can we?
To say that he is the first black president in American history is more to write the last lines of the last chapter than the start of a new one. Obama is much more than just black American. Like a growing number of citizens of our mixed-up world he is, as the columnist Michael Kinsley nicely puts it, “a one-man ethnic stew”. This qualifies him to represent all those Americans, of every hue and mix, that I saw in the long queues of people waiting to vote in downtown Washington, and in that crowd before the White House. For Obama is simultaneously the first post-ethnic president. To reduce this story to the black-white dichotomy is as useful as a black and white photograph of a colorful scene. Obama’s vote benefited from almost every aspect of America’s growing demographic diversity. Mark carefully, however, what the Obama model is. It deploys civic nationalism to transcend ethnic diversity. Many of Tuesday’s revelers were waving the Stars and Stripes, or sporting it on some part of their dress. No right-wing Republican could insist more than Obama does on American uniqueness, exceptionalism, manifest destiny. His proclaimed purpose is “to make this century the next American century”. If George W. Bush said that, we from the rest of the world might regard it as rank nationalist arrogance. Because it’s Obama, we somehow accept it.
Now comes the test. As he acknowledged in his sober acceptance speech, America has a huge mountain to climb. The very circumstances that ensured his victory make it more difficult for him to succeed. One can argue about “what would have happened if ...”, but it’s indisputable that the campaign turned decisively in his favor after September’s financial meltdown. Now the crisis is really hitting the real economy, on his chosen terrain of jobs, homes, savings and health care for ordinary Americans. He inherits a soaring national debt from Bush, who presided over a massive redistribution of wealth from future generations to the present one. The country faces two wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan, and a host of other challenges around the world.
Meanwhile, America itself is still divided. The gulf between red and blue may even be more difficult to bridge than that between black and white. Many Americans are still irrationally suspicious of Barack Hussein Obama, but an entirely rational observer could conclude that his instincts are more socially and cultural liberal than those of a cultural-conservative Republican, and less economically liberal than those of a libertarian Republican. To overcome those concerns, he would have to govern from the center or even center-right, disappointing his own supporters and taking on some triumphalist Democrats in Congress. Has he got what it takes: In himself, his team, and the power resources at his disposal? I spent the days before the vote talking to not a few Washington insiders, including some well-placed in his campaign. Their unanimous refrain was: We don’t know. We don’t know which of the many policy options he’ll plump for; we don’t know who he’ll choose for the key posts; we don’t know what he’ll be like on the job. Few presidential candidates have had less of an executive or legislative track record from which to guess their future performance in a job like no other.
On one thing all agree: If he can run the country the way he has run his campaign — one of the most effective ever — then America will be in good hands. But a country is not a campaign. He is, in every sense of that over-used word, cool. He barely looked excited even as he accepted the presidency before an ecstatic crowd. As president, his hard-power resources may be somewhat diminished, but no one in the world currently has more soft power. Where the Bush administration used military “shock and awe” to hunt down weapons of mass destruction that turned out not even to be there, Obama is himself a weapon of mass attraction.
And he can appeal to what is perhaps America’s greatest power resource: The can-do spirit of innovation, enterprise and hard work, mixed with civic patriotism, which this country invites everyone to embrace, wherever they come from. This is the promise summed up in what Obama called in his acceptance speech “that American creed: Yes We Can”. The American creed they were chanting outside the White House on that unforgettable Tuesday night.
If you ask me whether all this will be enough to surmount all the obstacles America now faces, I must in all honesty reply that, on a sober assessment, I doubt it. But we can again hope, and hope we must.
