Postcard from “post-racial” America, part three: election elegy.

11.4.2008 | 1:15 am | FTB On the Road, Obama for Prez

Formula One World Champion Lewis Hamilton, Senator Barack Obama

Filed from: Lahaina, Maui, Hawaii

Today, there is a strong possibility that America will elect its first person of color and first African-American to the highest office in the land, that of President of the United States. It is quite likely in many respects that the speed and effectiveness—to date—of Barack Obama’s ascendancy, has been bolstered to degrees incalculable by the utterly complete, yet haughtily delivered failures of the administration of George W. Bush. This conclusion is unavoidable, and overflows with the potential for Chris Rock-ish observation. Translated, it is something like this. Basically, it took the perfect damn storm. The most impossibly perfect damn storm. To make middle America ready to take a serious look at electing Barack Obama took some circumstances. First, it took middle America eight years of living under the reign of the worst president in United States history. Then the common folk had to damn near lose everything, while he presided over the biggest market crash in 60 years. And perhaps most critically, he also went ahead and cooked the books to get us into the most criminally mismanaged armed conflict in memory. To my mind at least, the mere fact that Barack Obama can be standing on the brink of the presidency is perhaps the only positive to have come from those eight years. The staggering blend of hubris and incompetence that have defined our recent history may have been precisely the slap in the face that America needed to wake up from its easy-credit and blind-nationalism fueled intellectual torpor.

Despite his considerable efforts to the contrary, Obama’s republican opponent, John McCain, has run a campaign that has been largely unable to shake the impression of similitude (McBush, as it were, to the leftist wonks). It must be assumed that he just, on some level, doesn’t really want to do anything very differently. Because at its core, the McCain campaign displays the same profound tone deafness to the basic needs of the everyday citizen. Oh, it’s artfully packaged, and more than a few will surely fall for the pretty colored wrapping paper, but his is a soulless campaign that, effectively breaks promises as quickly as it makes them. And this would-be emperor’s clothes are already coming off. The everyday Americans that have been the Republican stronghold since the Reagan Revolution are finally seeing the disingenuousness that girds the fallacy of “trickle-down” economics. And even though well armed with a phalanx of hockey moms and plumbers, he has callously assumed that this hokum will somehow play yet again. One has to hope that after eight years of blue-blood Skull and Bones quasi-cowboy, pseudo-populist bullshit, even the most die-hard social and fiscal conservatives have to have at least a shadow of a doubt now. Their banks are being socialized at great cost to taxpayers. They are losing their jobs. And whether they even realize it or not, they have been systematically cut out of the tax-relief shell game. Those “stimulus checks” didn’t do shit when it came time to save the house from foreclosure.

But belief is a strong and intoxicating tonic. And the belief extends deeper, to the specter of an us-versus-them xenophobia lurking just below the references to “normal Americans.” This is nothing more than a carefully wordsmithed attempt to get just enough disenfranchised working-class white folks to vote against their own self interest just one last time. Because the writing is on the wall. America is changing. And if not tomorrow, then it at least seems relatively certain that there won’t be another hundred years of handcrafting unnecessary wars and writing refund checks to the top one percent of wage earners before the hard truths emerge about where we find ourselves—collectively, and with our fates now truly intertwined—as a nation. We will either make the change, or the change will make us. The former is certainly the option that I hope we choose today.

What does this have to do with world driving champion Lewis Hamilton?

Well, there are the fears. I watched Tom Bradley’s California gubernatorial campaign implode at the polls back in the 1980s, due to the now eponymous “Bradley Effect.” And while that was some time ago, I still secretly fear the power of wantonly ignorant fringe and an “Obama Effect.” It certainly has been fueled, by attack ads and widely circulated e-mails foisting misinformation as though it were truth. Of course, another possibility exists, that being that some folks who would ordinarily vote Republican, but who cannot bring themselves to accept the possibility of voting for a black man, will simply abstain. They’ll just stay home. Or vote McCain out of spite. Several rural Ohioans expressed this sentiment with varying degrees of artlessness in a recent New Yorker article by George Packer. But moreover, the likelihood exists that this demographic isn’t represented in the polls to the extent that they actually exist. These potential “Obama Effect” generators (at worst) or non-voters (at best) are probably the least likely to pick up the phone and answer a few questions about who they plan to vote for. I don’t know if I can really say that I hope that they stay home, but frankly the less naked bigotry that finds its way to the polling places the better off we will all be.

Which brings us to Lewis Hamilton.

Unrelated, but related. On Sunday, at the Interlagos circuit in Sao Paulo, Brazil, the multiracial (black and white) Formula One sensation, Lewis Hamilton, became the 2008 World Driving Champion. He is also the youngest ever to achieve the feat, at 23, and did so in a most skillful and dramatic fashion: passing the Toyota of Timo Glock on the final lap, in the rain, to earn just enough points to prevent Brazilian Felipe Massa from winning the title for Ferrari. His story is even more remarkable, because he is not only the first person of African descent to with a driving title, he is also the first person of African descent to ever compete in the series. I flew to Montreal this year specifically for the chance to watch a piece of this profound new history being written. And now he finished the job. The best driver in the world is a black man.

Sadly, this is not where the story ends. What I left out is the fact that “enterprising” Brazilian fans had used the online space to start a cottage industry of hate in the weeks leading up to the final race. By virtue of a dedicated website and a seemingly bottomless reservoir of vitriol, the result—which I have only read accounts of but refuse to visit—shattered any notion I had that Brazil was one of the more enlightened countries in the world when it comes to such matters as skin tone and life chances. Booing the new world champion because he upended your countryman’s chances on his home track is one thing. Fine. Boo. But dedicated websites espousing racist rhetoric? When he’s a brown man like most of y’all? Just looking at the comments that followed the account of the race on Yahoo Sports posed an equally bracing shock. “Monkey Blood” was the preferred name that some were ascribing to Hamilton. I couldn’t believe what I was reading. Who writes this crap? As though these ignorant jabs might somehow diminish Hamilton’s achievement by affixing it to a backdrop of a heritage that fixes him as inferior no matter what the accomplishment. Even though he had just established a rather demonstrative show of superiority. That same old “you’ll always be a nig&$# bullshit. It only comes out of the woodwork when someone of African heritage is about to pull off something that was thought to be out of reach. Sometimes, a classy individual can gracefully dismiss this naked hatred. But, regardless it diminishes us all. Now, as it always has.

Which is where we retun to Barack Obama. We don’t know what’s going to happen today. Nor do we know what the collateral effects of President Barack Obama might mean when the power of the moment starts to exfoliate the carefully built layers of insulation that most Americans place between themselves and the primacy of race. No matter how we might deny it, race is still one of the prime movers in the national experience. If Mr. Obama loses because of a surge of quiet bigotry, I would not be shocked. If he wins, I will hope that this truly does signal a new beginning in terms of how American, both black and white, consider the world around them.

Everything I have read leads me to one conclusion about all of this: Barack Obama wants to lead us through a new reconciliation, to help us realize that the sum of the similarities are greater than the sum of the differences. And today, as when we first endorsed him a year and a half ago, I sincerely hope that he gets the chance to prove that he can be the one to drive the bus.

Daniel Turman

PS. Congratultions Lewis. Brilliant driver. Decent guy.