But Does America Deserve Obama?

There is a country that has realized that it is not above the society of nations, but part of it

For some time I believe that the rest of the world should have the legal status of official observer to the USA Congress. The decisions made in Washington, in fact, may have a greater impact on the lives of inhabitants in far away countries than those made in their respective capitals. The Pakistanis, the Venezuelans, the Palestinians, for example, for their own survival, are obligated to follow closely the changing and altering tides of American foreign policy. Depending on who resides in the White House, young Brits and Italians will be obliged to go abroad to kill or to be killed, or to stay home, hope, make love and earn a living. All of this explains the enormous attention that the presidential elections in the United States are generating; it is specifically the most important election of our époque and it can not be taken for granted that the Americans make the right choice. After the Supreme Court assigned George W. Bush the victory in 2000, there were many requests to assemble foreign observers to monitor closely the conduct of elections, as could happen in Zimbabwe.

The United States is in fact in crisis: it finds it difficult to realize that the twenty-first century is not its exclusive property, as was the case for the twentieth century. Their high school students stand in last place in the international surveys on education and learning in developed countries. Half of the high school students in large American cities do not receive diplomas. Only a third of the young people are even capable of attending university. A good part of young people that abandon their studies end up in prison; Americans represent five percent of the planet’s population, but Americans constitute a fourth of the prisoners in all of the world. Fifty million Americans lack health coverage and live in terror of getting sick.

In the elections, these questions of crucial importance do not receive all the attention that they should deserve on the part of the press, especially television, which is interested in absolutely banal details, such as whether Obama wore the pin with the US flag or whether Clinton lied about having escaped snipers in Bosnia. Furthermore, the Americans feel in their bones the scope of the emergency in which the country is living, when they lose their houses, see their savings disappear into nothing, remain bogged down in a war that no one will be capable of winning in the immediate future. Eighty-one percent of Americans believe that their country is on the wrong track and the president in office has reached the lowest ranking in history.

Barack Obama affirms that America still has some possibilities. His speech on the racial problem entitled “Toward a more perfect union” is unprecedented in its irreproachability, frankness, and complexity. What other American politician ever cited a writer in an electoral speech? Obama remembered Faulkner: “The past is not dead and buried. In fact it has not even passed.” This is a level of refinement to which Americans are not accustomed in the candidates electoral speeches. It is no surprise, therefore, that Obama is often defined as “elitist”. In a good part of the country a widespread anti-intellectualism prevails. A famous example of this anti-intellectualism was a speech by a Nebraska senator, Roman Hruska, in 1970. Trying to assert that a judge clearly reputed to be mediocre should nonetheless be nominated for the Supreme Court he said: “What does it matter if he is mediocre? There are very many judges, very many people, very many mediocre lawyers. Don’t they too have the right to have a little representation?”

The way in which Hillary Clinton has managed her electoral campaign has disconcerted more than one of those who could have supported her. Her threat of “annihilating” Iran should Teheran decide to attack Israel has made it so that people are asking themselves whether she is really much different from George Bush. From many points of view, Hillary is certainly better than Obama, for example in the fact that she is disposed to extend health care to everyone, a logical choice for a country that again proposes to be considered civil.

But an eventual Obama election doesn’t have much to do with politics, rather more with an idea of America, that multi-racial America, that wonderful and multi-form composite of skin colors and shades that one sees circulating on the streets of New York. Obama is a candidate born to a white mother from Kansas, a black father from Kenya, with an Indonesian Muslim stepfather, who has not only traveled a lot, but has also lived abroad. Obama represents the America that has finally realized that it is not above the community of nations but part of it.

When all is said and done, the question is not whether Obama deserves the victory or not, but whether America deserves a president of Obama’s caliber, if his electors are educated and refined enough to elect him. This election is too important, for America and for the whole world, for the mediocre to be the ones to decide.