Presidential election was national watershed
Pub Date: 12/1/2008
By Cole Boehler
Publisher and Editor
Like most, I was thoroughly exhausted by the election campaigns and the obnoxious candidate commercials that tend to convince us no matter who we elect, we'll have a bum.
While Montana had some exceedingly interesting, closely contested and hard fought campaigns, I was mostly interested in the presidential race.
I have long admired and respected John McCain for his straight talk, his record of service, his independence and willingness to break ranks with his party when his heart demanded it. In my view, Republican or Democrat ought to put conscience and constituents above partisan ardor. McCain did this bravely.
I was less familiar with Barack Obama early in the campaign. He's young and relatively inexperienced. On the surface he is articulate and a fine, inspirational orator. He also seems very bright and his academic credentials and debate performances would appear to bear that out.
I read Obama's second book, "The Audacity of Hope," well before the election and started on his first book, "Dreams From My Father," just before Election Day and completed it after he had won. His writings indicate he is a thoughtful and introspective individual with an excellent grasp of the language.
Is Obama presidential caliber material? I don't know. No one does yet. I guess we will all find out either to our delight or chagrin.
None of us will ever know if McCain would have been the better choice. As the old saw goes: "You pays your money and you takes your chances" and we have now paid our money.
McCain's concession speech, unfortunately, was the best of his campaign, brimming with graciousness, sincerity and integrity. Some said it was the "old McCain" speaking.
One thing is irrefutable: a majority of Americans in a majority of the states were willing to roll the dice on a man with a young, fresh face and odd name...and so goes the nation.
Before the election, I thought, "If whomever is elected can minimize the damage from the national train wreck, that will be a major achievement. If the next President manages to keep this runaway train on the rails until it can be stopped, he should be widely commended. If he actually turns it around and gets us steaming briskly in the right direction, he will be worthy of hero status."
I suppose this outlook means I have exceptionally low expectations. Perhaps. But they are higher now than they have been for awhile. Most accept we need a new national direction'; that what we have been doing has failed.
There is one especially high water mark from this campaign: I think perhaps now Americans can finally begin to put our dark past of slavery and racism behind us. In my lifetime we have made great strides to excise that social cancer and, I think, just made a major breakthrough.
As I grew up, there were no black people on TV or in commercials or ads. They didn't own businesses and weren't corporate executives. They were under-represented in academia and in government at all levels. The only place people of color even showed up on my early 1960s radar screen was on the athletic field where they were still struggling to take their rightful places.
I remember as a youth, as my sister and I traveled with my grandparents, we visited a city with a significant black population. My grandfather made a despicable and unfortunately common comment about African Americans, its ugliness evident even to this eight-year-old child in 1963. Grandpa was actually a very decent person, just conditioned by his times to utter this ignorant stereotype.
I also recall riding in the family station wagon with some buddies, Dad at the wheel, down the street where a black family lived and who were out in the yard on this day. One of my friends made some remark we would today call a "racial slur." Dad slammed on the brakes and wheeled the wagon to the curb, turned around and on the spot gave my friend a stern lecture on the evil and wrongness of racism.
How did my father overcome the bigotry of his father? I'm not sure, but I think it had to do with his service in a newly integrated U.S. Navy in 1950-53 and, perhaps even more enlightening to him, serving shore duty with his shipmates, white and black, in racist, segregated Pensacola, Florida. He told me many times how he despised the southern bigots who mistreated the blacks. My dad did not like seeing anyone treated cruelly.
My mother abhored racism, too. She grew up in Chicago, among the most segregated and racist cities in America. She used to tell us with horror about the blacks being forced to sit at the back of the bus, only in balconies at the movies, the separate drinking fountains marked "for coloreds," the lunch counters and restaurants where blacks wouldn't be seated or served and the hotels where they couldn't stay and the jobs they couldn't have.
I know It's because of my parents that I'm no bigot. Thank God for them and for that.
But I also remember trying to puzzle out the race riots of Watts and Newark and elsewhere in the early to late 1960's when I was a pre- and post-adolescent. I remember President John Kennedy calling out federal troops to assure black kids could attend desegregated schools. I was aware of President Lyndon Johnson's terrible difficulties in getting laws passed to end legal discrimination. And I remember well the assassination of Martin Luther King.
Now my 23-year-old son cannot imagine America as a nation where African Americans or other racial minorities were socially and legally second class and targets of discrimination of the worst kind. His generation, I think, has grown up almost completely color blind. He matured in a world where blacks and all other ethnicities were prominent in the world of arts and entertainment, sports, politics, education, business and government, even the judiciary.
He has grown up in a world better than the one my grandparents, parents and I grew up in. Now his children will grow up in a world where a black man has served his country as its President.
Perhaps the generational torch has been passed, and likely for the better. My son's generation is said to have played a pivotal role in the outcome of this election. It's about time the youth vote re-engaged. Besides, this is the first instance in my lifetime that the President will be younger than I am. How's that for a generational mile-marker?
we've come a long, long way, but we still have a ways to go, too.
While in the southwest recently, my wife, her father and I spent about four days out on the road seeing some of New Mexico and Arizona. We stopped in a tiny burg in the mountains of eastern Arizona at a funky little backwater bar we had visited before. Some "locals" were hanging out shooting pool.
Perhaps foolishly, but with the best of intentions, my extremely social and outgoing father-in-law made an attempt to move conversation along. He asked, "Well, how is Obama going to do in these parts?"
One of the fellows, formerly from Colorado, he said, spoke up. "Well, I can tell you we ain't voting for no (n-word) around here."
It was a gut-punch. That terrible word still has such awful power.
My wife whispered, "Let's get the hell out of here." We guzzled what was left of our drinks and departed hastily.
It made me very sad'; sad for this man, this town, this country.
And I knew we were still not to The Promised Land. But we can see it from here.
Source: The Montana Tavern Times, December, 2008, published monthly by Continental Communications, 125 W. Granite St., Suite 102, Butte, MT 59701.
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