Street Style

President Obama

Imagine a winning contender for an Australian election standing in The Domain in Sydney on a cold autumn night to deliver a victory speech. Imagine that the speech was delivered not to ‘the party faithful’, colleagues and staffers but to 75,000 ordinary people drawn there by the pure charisma of the candidate, the otherworldly power of his oratory, and the inspiration of a message you accept, through tears, as nothing less than a rewriting of history.

It’s the answer that led those who have been told for so long by so many to be cynical, and fearful, and doubtful of what we can achieve to put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day.

Pause and consider the hardened internal narrative you hold about America. Country of rednecks, moronic, bible-bashing, capitalism-loving militaristic hicks. Ruiner of lives in foreign invasion after invasion. Racist, arrogant, jingoistic, ignorant. A force for evil in the world.

And to all those who have wondered if America’s beacon still burns as bright –tonight we proved once more that the true strength of our nation comes not from our the might of our arms or the scale of our wealth, but from the enduring power of our ideals: democracy, liberty, opportunity, and unyielding hope.

Decide whether you’re now still comfortable with that narrative. Consider whether you’d ever realistically believed that America would elect the black guy with the funny name. The secret muslim, ivy league elite, Junior Senator from Illinois.

Last November Australia elected a competent, managerial-type Prime Minister who gave plenty of people a lift when he overthrew a nasty power-hungry old man. And we congratulated ourselves because, while our stable political history may be boring, at least we don’t consider ourselves the greatest country on earth. We carry our cynicism as a badge of pride.

The American dream we argued smugly, the dream so derided by the more sensible of the earth, has so often proven destructive in its self-assuredness. But the value of that dream lies in the little chink of light which we saw in the distance, from a fabled, possibly even fabricated past. The chink of light that President-elect Obama saw in the darkness all those years ago and refused to ignore. The audacity of hope.

This is our moment. This is our time — to put our people back to work and open doors of opportunity for our kids; to restore prosperity and promote the cause of peace; to reclaim the American Dream and reaffirm that fundamental truth — that out of many, we are one; that while we breathe, we hope, and where we are met with cynicism, and doubt, and those who tell us that we can’t, we will respond with that timeless creed that sums up the spirit of a people: Yes We Can.

The fantastic tale that motivates the American people could never exist here. The naïve idealism seems to have been drilled out of our politics. The Australian style is epitomised by the aloof incompetence of some of our state governments, seemingly elected only to shuffle leadership cards between factional warlords.

In the United States, it took one guy who refused to let that type of system prevail. And while his greatest flaw may have been to set the bar impossibly high, the value of Barack Obama’s victory is in the demolition of old norms. People all over his country will now be motivated to turn the talk of the American dream into reality. The name ‘the land of opportunity’ may no longer be used as a sarcastic jibe after such a vivid evocation of its power.  

Other presumptions also fell by the wayside. The necessity of the Atwater-Rove ‘ends determines the means’ style campaign tactics. Likewise, going negative in an election campaign became a hindrance. McCain, that decent man with the history of bipartisanship, started to look like a puppet, his misguided advisors twisting and distorting his ideals and motivations.

The chestnut that only a Southern Democrat – Clinton of Arkansas, Carter of Georgia or Johnson of Texas – could ever convince the rednecks to vote blue suddenly looked shaky as Virginia, Florida and North Carolina came into the fold, changing accepted electoral thinking set in stone since the civil rights movements of the 60s.

The initially derided fifty-state strategy of Obama and campaign manager David Axelrod seemed both shrewd and prescient once the polls in formerly solidly-red Indiana, Missouri and Georgia started to turn. The messages of hope and change really did transcend old barriers. Red states and blue states were becoming the United States.

And the power of Internet campaigning, first hinted at by Howard Dean in the 2004 Democratic primaries, was devastatingly confirmed as Obama smashed previous fundraising records and the assumptions that accompanied them. Those who had previously felt left out from the political process only needed make a $10 donation here and there and suddenly they held more power than the richest Republican fundraisers. The people were speaking.

Of course, the new President will inherit a country teetering on the brink of a collapse ushered in by the wildly incompetent Bush-Cheney regime. It’s as though Bush’s rich get richer message of corruption and pandering to elite interests was tailored specifically to engage those formerly excluded citizens who turned out in their millions to propagate the Obama message.

Such was the strength of that message that surely now even those who voted against Obama have had their freedom restored. The freedom to dream that had seemed crushed in modern America. And hopefully, now, freedom from the internal prison of hate that is racism - the wilful denial of reality which fuelled the suppression of black Americans since the days of slavery. The dream of Martin Luther King, whose words now sit side by side with those of the President-elect has finally been realised. Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!