The faces of change: America's P and VP elect

When you’re standing in the middle of a crowd a quarter of a million strong, you don’t actually know it. In Chicago’s Grant Park this past Tuesday night, you could certainly feel the intense heat generated by so many bodies and feel the odd, ghostly pressure they exert — this was not an experience for the claustrophobic or the faint of heart — but it was impossible to see very far beyond where you yourself were standing. Only the presence of massive television monitors, occasionally showing aerial views of the gathering, made you realize how extraordinarily large was the assemblage in which you were a tiny component.

That and the noise. There was amplified recorded music — Americans apparently no longer think it possible to enjoy a spectacle without a sound track — and the constant hum of tens of thousands of separate conversations. But I had no idea what noise can be until around 10 PM, when the giant TV monitor, tuned to CNN, suddenly flashed the words “Barack Obama Elected President of the United States.” We all knew it was coming, but that didn’t matter. Cliché though it be, it’s absolutely accurate to say that as one voice the crowd erupted in a sustained, ecstatic roar.

Truly an astonishing moment. The victory didn’t come as a surprise, of course; even the confirmed pessimists among us — and God knows Democrats have had their pessimism confirmed repeatedly, through bitter experience — must have known an Obama victory was by far the likelier result. But still, the utter historical implausibility of this outcome and the immensity of what it proclaimed about the country were overwhelming. There are some developments for which you simply can’t prepare yourself; the prospect, no matter how repeatedly imagined, doesn’t begin to capture the existential reality. All around me people were unselfconsciously, perhaps even unconsciously, laughing, shouting, embracing, sobbing openly. This didn’t feel simply like an electoral victory. It felt like a pivot-point in history.

“Only in America!” some among the punditry have proclaimed. Fatuously? Maybe. There are, I suppose, some international precedents for what has just occurred, or at least for something like it: You might cite Alberto Fujimoro in Peru. Or perhaps Sonia Gandhi, even if her role in Indian politics isn’t directly governmental. Maybe even Benjamin Disraeli, taking the sociology of 19^th century Britain into account. Occasions when tribal outsiders have been elevated to positions of tribal leadership. But the election this past Tuesday feels different. Barack Obama is not himself descended from slaves, of course, but the historical fact of slavery in this country and its persistent repercussions into our own time — the fact that so many African-Americans who voted for Obama in 2008 were, within living memory, prevented from voting at all — make this seem unique.

The racial make-up of the crowd in Grant Park was noteworthy too. Or rather, to be more precise, I didn’t notice it at all until John McCain’s extremely gracious concession speech was shown on the same big monitor that had, a few minutes earlier, announced Obama’s victory. When the camera panned the Republican’s audience of disheartened supporters, there wasn’t a single non-white face to be seen. Whereas the celebratory crowd in which I was standing looked like a Benetton ad.

Does this election suggest that African-Americans are no longer regarded as tribal outsiders by the nation as a whole? Well, not necessarily. Here’s a story that has been making the rounds of the American blogosphere. I can’t vouch for its accuracy, but it at least purports to be true. An Obama campaign worker, so the story goes, was walking the streets of a blue-collar neighbourhood in western Pennsylvania a couple of weeks ago, and stopped at one house and knocked on the door. A middle-aged woman answered. The campaign worker asked if the woman had decided which presidential candidate she intended to support, and the woman replied, “I don’t know for sure, let me ask my husband.” And then shouted into the house, “Who are we voting for?” And a male voice could be heard from within the house, calling out, “We’re voting for the nigger!” And the woman, without the slightest sign of discomfiture, said to the campaign worker, “Looks like we’re voting for the nigger.”

In some ways, this story might be said to symbolize the whole election.  Even some unregenerate, unashamed racists felt compelled to vote Democratic.

Another anecdote that arguably makes the same point: After the new president-elect had spoken, as my wife and I were finally leaving the celebration in Grant Park, walking on narrow wooden planks laid down as a walkway along the moist, muddy turf, I collided with a large bearded black man who was approaching the same walkway from a different route. We had a brief, good-natured Alphonse-et-Gaston exchange, and then I suddenly recognized him: Wendell Pierce, the magnificent actor who played Bunk in my favorite TV series, “The Wire.” After I expressed my admiration for the program, we said a few excited words about the election. “That’s the one thing I guess we have to thank George Bush for,” he said. “He was so terrible, he made tonight possible.”

A colour-blind nirvana has not overnight descended on the United States, and racism hasn’t been eradicated root and branch with one sudden stroke. But in 2008 voters were able to look at the condition of the country and assess the talents of the two candidates, and essentially say, “Some things are more important than race.” As my grandmother Rochel Abramsky, another tribal outsider, used to say, “That ain’t chopped liver.”

One tiny historical footnote: When my wife and I walked back to our hotel along Michigan Avenue after the parties were finally starting to wind down, there were also, along with the raucous, jocose, ad hoc street celebrations stretching along the whole broad boulevard, closed this night to vehicular traffic, a wide variety of street vendors peddling election memorabilia to the passers-by. And most strikingly, a number were offering tee shirts that said, “Yes We Did!” Were those printed in advance of the actual victory, a reckless investment in a hoped-for eventuality? Or was some nearby factory poised to go into emergency production at the first indication the country was turning blue? I suppose we’ll never know.