The bold newspaper headlines captured the spirit of the day: Obama, Obama overcomes, A Dream fulfilled.
Some 145 years after President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation freeing slaves, and 44 years after President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act annulling Jim Crow segregationist laws, Barack Hussein Obama, a first-term U.S. senator from Illinois, defied the weight of history and was elected the first African-American president of the United States, beating his honourable but ineffectual Republican opponent, John McCain, by a commanding margin.
Obama’s astonishing ascendancy to the White House closes a dark chapter in American race relations, during which the democratic rights of its downtrodden black population were all too often denied. African Americans were subjected to oppressive and humiliating restrictions and conventions, even after the seminal Civil War. Jim Crow laws – which segregated public facilities, relegated African-Americans to second-class citizenship and made a mockery of American ideals – crushed their dignity and aspirations. It took decades of civil rights protests, impassioned speeches and judicial interventions to correct glaring injustices that condemned millions of law-abiding American citizens to hostility, ostracism, violence, dashed hopes and virtual servitude.
When Obama, a 47-year-old Harvard University graduate, launched his brilliant campaign to be the Democratic party’s presidential nominee, few observers gave him any chance of winning. Apart from his biracial ancestry, he had a foreign-sounding name and was burdened by the maliciously false rumour that he was secretly a Muslim. Obama, a Christian, took these slurs in stride as he defeated the superbly capable front-runner, Hillary Clinton, the junior senator from New York. As he crisscrossed the country, he pledged a fundamental change in direction, bringing his “Yes we can” message of hope to an increasingly multicultural nation scarred by the spectre of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism, shaken by an economic crisis and mired in protracted wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The outcome of last week’s election is not only a historic triumph for Obama and a repudiation of President George W. Bush’s generally dismal record, but equally a resounding victory for minority rights and a transformative event.
Obama, whose inexorable march to the White House was supported by seven out of 10 American Jews, inherits a mound of problems and confronts a panoply of challenges as he readies himself fore the world’s most important job. The U.S. economy is faltering. Americans are in dire need of a national health care plan. Wars in distant lands have strained America’s credibility and sapped its coffers. Washington’s relationship with a resurgent Russia is unravelling. China beckons as a superpower. The Arab-Israeli conflict still simmers. Iran – a destabilizing influence in the Middle East and Israel’s arch enemy – is racing toward acquiring a nuclear arsenal. Obama, a cool, level-headed man of integrity, clearly has his work cut out for him. Let us hope he succeeds. In the meantime, we hail his successful run for the presidency as an encouraging and seismic turning point in American democracy. – S.K.