On Tuesday night here in the USA, Senator Barack Obama, the son of a Kenyan economist and a white American anthropologist, was elected the 44th President of the United States. In every way, from fund raising to strategy to message, his campaign has defied expectations and torn down walls. He is the first African American to be elected president, an unparalled achievement for this country that, much like Australia, has long struggled to move beyond its history of racism and prejudice. And Obama did it without ever making the election a referendum on race.
He also scoffed at the conventional wisdom that to win an election, one 'microtargets' specific states and districts within states, placing all one of one's campaign efforts there. While Clinton and McCain both ran such campaigns, Obama ran a 50 state strategy, travelling and committing resources not only to places he might be able to win but places where Democrats had not set foot in a generation. His rationale, as his campaign strategist David Axelrod put it early in the evening, was that 'Sen. Obama wanted to be president of all 50 states, even those who disagree with him.'
So in his speech Obama extended his hand to his those who did not support him, saying, 'I may not have won your vote tonight, but I hear your voices. I need your help. And I will be your president, too.' In the light of the last eight years, in which one party fundamentally dismissed not only the concerns but the voices of the other, a truly remarkable statement.
Also in the face of the Clinton/McCain, baby boomer generation of politicians who tend to speak in terms of an 'us' battling a 'them' and in some cases use fear as a motivator, Obama spoke to what Abraham Lincoln called 'the better angels of our nature,' his main themes social reconciliation, self-sacrifice and the shining 'audacity of hope'. Few of the politicians or pundits of the Clinton/McCain generation seem to appreciate or respect even now the deep reservoirs of yearning Obama's words have tapped into. As someone here said to me recently, 'I'm so tired of war. The war in Iraq, the war on terror, the culture wars – enough with wars.' Lacking that sense of the electorate's frustration with division and nastiness, both the massive Clinton political machine and the McCain