Editor’s Note: Beyond Obama

Article Tools

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

It was a brilliant October day in 1990 and hundreds of students and faculty were gathered in front of the University of Minnesota’s student union. Wellstone stood on a makeshift podium in wrinkled shirtsleeves and spoke passionately about the need for fair wages, universal health care, and an end to military madness. I was covering the rally for a story in the student newspaper, and vividly remember the Carleton College professor talking about how students were having to sell plasma to buy books. He was coiled up, jabbing the air with his index finger, screaming mad. “It’s outrageous,” he spat. “Outrageous!”

A month later, on election night, I watched as scores of jubilant Democrats waved Wellstone signs over their heads at a victory party in downtown Minneapolis. Grizzled beat reporters were giggling. Longtime liberals, so used to losing they wouldn’t really believe they’d won until morning, were weeping. Wellstone promised to never practice politics as usual. He promised to always fight for the dispossessed. He promised to never, ever sell out. I put my notebook in my back pocket, turned off my tape recorder, and began to cheer.

As I wrote for a local paper in 2002 after Wellstone died in a plane crash, I never forgot that campaign and I never let Wellstone live it down. No matter how tirelessly he worked, no matter how progressive his voting record, it was never enough. He radicalized a generation of young Minnesota voters reared on Reagan and Bush and, in the process, set the bar heroically high, leaving little room for human error.

Obama is a young man, and no matter what his political future, he too will disappoint the same people he instigated. It’s inevitable. Nevertheless, the millions he’s already touched will never forget this moment in history because, no matter your political stripe, there’s no denying that our nation has been sleepwalking for the past eight years. We put the covers over our heads on September 12, 2001, got up to look around in 2004, and then hit the snooze button again, hoping that things would work themselves out. They didn’t. And they won’t.

Obama has jolted us awake. The air is crackling again with the power of possibility, with the belief that there’s still some magic to be squeezed out of the American Dream. And that sensation is as real as it is unforgettable.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print