PRESIDENT RUSTY

The New York Times, as a subtext to its November 5, 2008 boldface masthead headline “OBAMA,” said “Racial Barrier Falls In Heavy Turnout.”

Something troubles me about this being the automatically accepted “big story” of Obama’s win. Something seems off when CNN lingers on a weeping Jesse Jackson and a tearful, jubilant Oprah Winfrey during Obama’s stirring speech after accepting John McCain’s concession call, finding the drama mostly there—American blacks finally overcome.

The MSM as Sarah Palin dubbed them are trying to interpret Obama through the prism of their own worldview, seeing Obama as the ultimate answer to their generation’s goals of hippie peace love and understanding, and thus Obama as the culmination of a decades-long struggle to finally integrate the presidency and to bring equality to the White House.

And there is no doubt that it is an important event in American history—that we have chosen a black man to represent us in the most important and powerful office in the world. But this view of the 2008 presidential election misses a huge point, I think, and ironically belittles Obama’s race by implying that it matters more than it does. To put it another why, while his race matters to some people, it’s not the most important story.

What we liberals have always had a hard time understanding is that true equality happens not from some politically-correct accommodation of someone’s specific race, religion, gender or sexual orientation (Jackie Robinson’s integration of baseball is perhaps the ultimate justification of this view; baseball’s color barrier was [and needed to be] forced down), but happens instead through true indifference to it. I think my attraction to Obama as a candidate is not his race but that he was born AFTER 1960. Maybe he’s not necessarily a Gen-X’er but he’s closer to that ‘tween-generation and has more in common with it than Hillary’s Boomers and obviously McCain’s de facto Greatest Generation (McCain’s actually more of a Boomer in age but he flies like a GG’er by virtue of his family pedigree and the “Country First” world view he at least aspired to.)

Barack Obama is Brian Johnson, Anthony Michael Hall’s nerd in the Breakfast Club, (a reference that perhaps only someone born after 1960 will understand.) He’s a geek-made-good and proof that brains matter and that, when push comes to shove and we find ourselves stuck in weekend detention, the smart kid is the one we want doing our homework. This is why he was elected.

Check out this sorta summing-it-all-up piece in the Financial Times. Obama is by all accounts an outsider, a super-brain with mother/father issues, a nice guy, a sober non-party'er, and a man driven to succeed. While we've all fiddled away despite the fires burning our country's financial health and precipitating our moral bankruptcy, Obama was inviting himself to study hall and avoiding the cool kids in the cafeteria. But he prepared when we really needed him and now he's stepped up. Hopefully he can get us an A on our social studies paper.