All these years later, it can be hard to remember quite what it was like. For the very youngest members of today’s electorate, it’s something that happened when they were just children. Even those of us who have been casting presidential ballots for decades may have trouble recollecting exactly how it felt. Because in the entire history of the Republic, there’s never been anything quite like it.
Around a decade ago, during a brief visit to New York, I had dinner with an old friend of mine who is highly intelligent and supremely level-headed and certainly not the type to give in to sudden and rhapsodic enthusiasms. As it happened, she had come straight to the restaurant from what I assume must have been a fundraiser. At it, she’d heard a talk by a certain individual who at that point, I guess, was at the exploratory stage of a presidential candidacy. Her eyes were aglow. He was all she could talk about. She’d been floored by his eloquence, his charm, his palpable earnestness, his passionately articulated vision of a post-racial America. I had been aware of this fellow, but had not thought seriously about him as a candidate for the White House: all else aside, he was simply too inexperienced, with no national record to speak of. But my friend’s excitement challenged my perceptions. If she, of all people, could get this worked up over Barack Obama, maybe I should pay him a bit more attention.
So I read his book, Dreams from My Father. It disturbed me. This was supposed to be the post-racial hero who’d finally heal America’s most ancient wound? Take his family. The middle-class white grandparents who’d raised him had, apparently, been invariably loving – in his narrative, they came across as veritable saints – but he called them racists; by contrast, his accounts of his privileged, polygamous Kenyan father made it clear that the old man had been a world-class jerk and egomaniac, utterly indifferent to his wives and children, but in Obama’s eyes every one of the man’s failings was, somehow, the product of white racism.
As I wrote in December 2007: “Forget the content of our character; this is a work preoccupied with skin color.” It was, moreover, a book by a man more in love with Kenya and Indonesia than with America; a man who, at least in his boyhood, had had a close attachment to Islam, the religion of his father and stepfather; a man who’d enjoyed immense good fortune and experienced very little real hardship but who seemed to feel he’d had a rough ride and hadn’t gotten his due.
Months later, when the news came out about Obama’s virulently racist pastor and longtime mentor, Jeremiah Wright, it just confirmed – and then some – my worst suspicions about the junior senator from Illinois. “Millions have been drawn to Obama,” I blogged in March 2008, “because he has seemed to them to be something more than a politician. Alas, it seems increasingly clear that in fact he’s the best, the slickest, politician of them all.” Seeking to put the Wright debacle behind him, Obama delivered his now-famous speech on race. For me, it only underscored “the absurdity of the fact that a man capable of such an eloquent affirmation of America’s founding principles could have spent twenty years’ worth of Sunday mornings listening to the vile ravings of a boorish jackass.”
Yet for Obama’s true believers, his sermon on race was only further proof that he was The One. Instead of holding him up to any standards, they felt it was their job – our job – to live up to him. “We have been asked to reflect in the most serious of ways about the role that race plays in the life of our country,” wrote the political scientist Alan Wolfe. “I cannot recall any leader or potential leader in the last two or three decades asking us to do that. I hope we are up to the challenge.” As I commented at the time: “This is not how America is supposed to work, people. We’re not here to prove anything to our leaders….But Obama has already got so many people thinking otherwise.”
