Charles Kaiser on Barack Obama's next challenge

"We know the battle ahead will be long; but always remember that no matter what obstacles stand in our way, nothing can stand in the way of the power of millions of voices calling for change."
—Barack Obama, January 8, 2008

"Today, the process ends."
—Rep. James Clyburn, Democrat, South Carolina, June 3, 2008

We did it. Against all odds, we did it.

Despite a national press corps obsessed with the trivial, an electorate dangerously tinged with racism, and the opposition of the most powerful political machine the Democratic party has produced since the Kennedy dynasty ended in 1968, America will make magnificent history today: We will choose Barack Obama as the first African American to become the presidential candidate of a major political party.

This is an extraordinary achievement, and Americans under 30 deserve most of the credit. Partly because they are determined to repudiate the racial and sexual prejudices of their predecessors, Xers and Millennials turned out in record numbers to give Barack Obama his first essential victory in Iowa.

Now, they also bear the greatest responsibility for what happens next, because it is entirely within their power to ensure Obama's victory in November. But unless they vote in larger numbers than young people have ever voted before in America, a Republican victory is a certainty. Only through record-breaking participation will we be able to overcome the real handicap that the first black Democratic nominee faces in November.

Never before have we faced a starker choice: a brilliant 46-year-old multiracial candidate committed to ending a disastrous war and creating an entirely new kind of America, pitted against a 71-year-old mediocrity who promises an impossible "victory" in Iraq—and who abandoned every iconoclastic principle he ever embraced—to secure the radical right-wing base of the Republican party.

Obama's nomination is an act of will and an act of faith. He is, after all, the junior senator from Illinois, a man unknown outside of Chicago and Springfield until he electrified the Democratic National Convention less than four years ago. But it is not just a hunger for change that produced his victory. He will be the Democratic nominee for president because he is a brilliant man who ran the most brilliant political campaign of modern times.

No other living American politician could have met the challenge of Jeremiah Wright's outrageous sermons by delivering the most powerful speech about race anyone has made since Martin Luther King, Jr., died 40 years ago. So it is supremely appropriate that Obama will accept the Democratic nomination on the 45th anniversary of King's iconic speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial, because his selection marks the first time that our nation has lived up to the legacy that the life of Martin Luther King, Jr., bequeathed to us.

In New Hampshire, where he lost to Hillary Clinton, Obama declared, "We have been told we cannot do this by a chorus of cynics that will only grow louder and more dissonant." But today it is possible—just possible—that in 2008 we will finally bind up the racial wounds that have afflicted us since our founding, to triumph in what Molly Ivins identified as "one long struggle to extend the liberties established in our Constitution to everyone in America."

Naturally, we feel a little exhausted today, 15 months after Obama announced his candidacy in Springfield. Together, Clinton and Obama have spent a staggering $400 million on the primary campaign, and they made nearly 1,800 campaign appearances. It has been a mean and nasty contest, with dark echoes of 1968, when the antiwar movement wasted most of its energy fighting within itself instead of focusing its fire on Richard Nixon.

But is not too late to write a new, more hopeful chapter. Tonight is Obama's moment of triumph, but it also offers Hillary Clinton the single greatest opportunity of her career. She has been a magnificent role model for all Americans committed to equality, and she has proven that a woman will, someday, become president. But now the time has come for her to reach deep inside herself, to put principle above personal ambition, and to do everything in her power to make sure that Barack Obama is the next president of the United States. If she can do that, she will secure a hallowed place in the hearts of everyone committed to liberty, and justice, for all.

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