The day after: Amid celebrations, a new fight begins

By Weekly Archive On Nov 12, 2008

Reflections
on the election of Barack Obama

On
Election Day 2004, I worked on a get-out-the-vote drive for John
Kerry in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. After a long day, the polls had
closed, and I started my drive home to Brooklyn, listening to
electoral returns on the car radio. Early signs were good. Passing
through New Jersey, when the announcer declared Pennsylvania a win
for Kerry, I felt satisfied with having contributed in a small way to
a victory. But by the time I was crossing Staten Island, the
electoral count had started to sour. I began listening to the best of
the 80s and 90s, only periodically flipping back to the news for
updates. When I arrived home in Brooklyn, the race had not yet been
officially called, but I went to bed with the dread of living under
another Bush administration.

Traveling
earlier this fall in Florida, I talked with a friend who is a
lifelong trade unionist and an unrepentant Nader voter from 2000. I,
too, had supported the Nader campaign that year as a strategy to
curtail the Democrats’ rightward shift, although I argued that
swing-state voters should use a “Nader-Trader” program to
symbolically exchange their votes with Gore supporters in safe
states. My friend and I recalled how Gore had been the Clinton
administration’s hatchet man at the World Trade Organization
meetings in Seattle, seemingly doing his best to aggravate organized
labor. We remembered, too, how his selection of Joe Lieberman seemed
uniquely designed to alienate the left, especially since both came
from the conservative wing of the party.

Putting
aside the bitter debate about soundness of the Nader 2000 strategy, I
never could have felt so elated with the election of Al Gore — or,
for that matter, of John Kerry — as I now feel with the election of
Barack Obama. On Election Day, it was evident that the historic
nature of his candidacy tapped a deeper stream of emotion. Never
before had I knocked on a stranger’s door for a campaign and,
immediately after explaining where I was from, received an overjoyed
hug — something that happened when I returned to Pennsylvania
yesterday as part of a labor mobilization for Obama. With the
exception of the Seattle protests, never have I been a part of a
street celebration so jubilant — people were dancing on the hoods of
taxis — as the one that erupted on my block in Brooklyn later that
night.

Obama
will be our first African-American president — not in the way that
Clarence Thomas is one of the first African-American Supreme Court
justices or the way Sarah Palin might have been the first woman vice
president. Thomas and Palin have at once benefitted from the social
movements that made their ascents possible and worked to undermine
the legacy of these movements. Obama, in contrast, will become the
first African-American president by realizing the hopes of civil
rights activists and honoring their contributions.

Obama
rose to the top of a Democratic pool that, as a whole, positioned
itself notably to the left of what we had come to expect in the
Clinton-Gore years, when top officials scrambled to prove their
pro-corporate bona
fides
and to declare their allegiance to the Democratic Leadership Council.
Today’s contenders, while far from perfect from a progressive
perspective, campaigned as opponents of an unjust war and of faulty
trade agreements such as NAFTA,
as
advocates of pro-worker labor law reform and of serious national
health care.

To
be sure, the struggle to fulfill the vision of the civil rights
movement — like the more contemporary fight to thwart the
rightward-pushing forces within the Democratic Party — is not over.
The likes of Robert Rubin and Larry Summers hover over Obama’s
victory. Progressives face the challenge of asserting that Obama’s
victory should mean not only a rejection of the brash, imperial
globalism of the Bush years, but also of the softer model of
corporate rule that grew under Clinton.

This
fight has just begun. It will be a difficult task to convert a
movement to elect Obama into a drive to build grassroots power and to
hold him accountable. But, for now, as we celebrate the end of the
Bush era, there can be no doubt that we are in a better position to
act than just a day ago. And it’s not often when we can say that
with confidence and genuine joy.

Mark
Engler, a writer based in New York City, is a senior analyst with
Foreign Policy In Focus and author of How
to Rule the World: The Coming Battle Over the Global Economy (Nation
Books, 2008). He
can be reached via the Web site http://www.DemocracyUprising.com.