After hunting around online for various streaming videos and “updated every 2 minute” electoral vote counts, I remembered that I have CNN, MSNBC and BBC on my damn TV. And so it was that I was able to watch history in the making – always a cool thing to do.
It’s no secret that Obama can deliver a speech, but watching him just now I realized it’s more than that. Any trained politician can deliver a speech. What Obama can do, and where McCain so obviously failed, is deliver hope and belief that he will foster in a new dawn for America – a better America.
Will everything change tomorrow? In January? In 2009? Not likely. But today American politics, which for so long has slipped further and further out of touch with both its own people and the international community, has taken a massive step back towards where it should be – a symbol of freedom, liberty and democracy.
Because, and this is key, a person or a country doesn’t have to be perfect to be a role model, but they have to at least appear to be trying – and it’s been a long time since America has appeared to be trying much of anything but xenophobic isolationism.
Obama’s foreign policy isn’t set to make huge changes in the way America handles the world outside Her borders, but perception is everything. Having a black man, with a foreign sounding name, whose father and step-father were foreigners, who grew up outside the continental United States… the perception of a Ultra-Christian White/Right America has come to an end.
Whatever happens next, today is a great day in America’s history. A day where, for the first time in my life, I am proud to be North American not because of my birth country, but because of the country just south of it.
America, take a bow. Obama, give yourself a pat on the ass. You won it without attacks, you won it without the “race card”, you won it with integrity. Sure there’s much to be done, but today you can sit back, crack a cold one and say “well fucking done.”
