In Hebrew, my mother tongue, the word ‘barack’ means lightning. I know that lightning comes before the thunder, before the storm.
But to anyone who sees it in a clear sky, lightning is an amazing phenomenon. Indeed, US presidential candidate Barack Obama, like his name, is a lightning phenomenon. I am happy with my Irish citizenship, but I often think I would like to be able to vote for Obama, to work for his election, simply because I have never come across such a mesmerising leader.
Watching coverage of the Democratic Party’s convention in Denver, I cannot help thinking that here is the fulfilment of Martin Luther King’s dream. It has been said many times before. but the sheer fact that a black American can stand proud in front of thousands of people, and seek their votes for what is (let’s reluctantly face it) the most powerful political job in the world, is deeply meaningful.
The fact that only 45 years after segregation and after King’s famous speech, a black professor and senator can become the Democratic candidate for the US presidency means that America may finally be able to go beyond race, towards a new future.
Forgive me for sounding like an Obama evangelist, but hearing his wife Michele declare her pride for the first time in being American at the swell in national support for her husband makes me go this way.
Yet I am also deeply worried. because the closer we get to the election in November, the more talk there is about race being a deciding factor.
We have the voters in Livonia, Michigan – reportedly the whitest town in the US – telling The Guardian that ‘other people’ (never quite themselves) would not like to see a black president. Certainly, the ‘I’m not a racist, but…’ brigade is out in force.
We also have voters in Philadelphia, Mississippi, a southern mixed town, telling reporters assuredly that Obama is Muslim – no statement about his Christianity would persuade them otherwise. But wait a moment: America is supposed to be a secular republic. So would it really matter if a candidate for presidency was Muslim? Does it really matter if he is black?
But these things do matter hugely, it seems. Even though the hallmarks of segregation – the separate drinking fountains, the ‘coloured’ sections in the back of buses and, of course, the schools – are gone, the process lives just under the surface, and not only in the south. In fact, as The Guardian reports, the most segregated towns are in the supposedly liberal north – New York, Chicago, Cleveland and Cincinnati. And the polls demonstrate the racial divide, with blacks and Hispanics backing Obama and whites obstinately backing McCain.
However, as Stan Dearman – the editor of a local paper in Philadelphia, Mississippi – told The Guardian, the idea that Obama’s daughters might one day play on the White House lawn fills him with hope. “It will be a big, big thing. It would say that we, as a country, have arrived. There’s a need for redemption, there always will be. An Obama presidency will provide some of that redemption.”
The coverage of Obama’s march to the White House has surpassed most other presidential campaigns in living memory – because he is charismatic, fresh and different . He is t h e lightning in a clear summer sky – a harbinger of new things, of rain on a parched land. I want to tell America, whites and blacks alike: ‘Don’t extinguish that lightning. Bring Obama home.’
