If the last 8 years have seemed progressively more difficult, with one misfortune following another, each "oh no!" crashing into the aftermath of the last in the style of a poor Hollywood thriller, and each next year looming with new and more dismal varieties of trouble, then I think 2008 is going to look more and more like an oasis, a beacon, a cornucopia of hopeful things to be remembered. And I'm hoping to bring some of 2008 into the new year with me. I'm going to post a list of these things over the course of the next week or two. Some of them are music, some of them are books, some of them are personal experiences, and a couple of them are political. I'll get the political ones over with first. I know I'm not a political expert, and so I'm going to try to avoid actual political issues and just talk about what inspired and affected me.
1. Barack Obama's calm and dignified electioneering. He said he wouldn't stoop to the mudslinging and division of recent elections and damn if he didn't mostly succeed. He said he would try to help create a campaign about inclusion, about finding common ground, about respect, and it seems to me like he mostly succeeded. Obama wasn't my first choice for president at the beginning of the process, but I was deeply moved and impressed by his effort to create a different kind of campaign.
2. Barack Obama's Philadelphia speech on race. Is this the very first time a major American public figure has spoken about our racial issues not as a struggle between competing interests, but as a shared problem to be worked on together? Is this the first speech on race that people of various races could identify with? Were we just spoken to as grown-ups who can handle our conflicted emotions and ideas about this complicated issue? I'm still amazed.
3. The last three weeks of John McCain's electioneering. Just when McCain's slide into the muck seemed inevitable, he stepped back from the edge. I thought the turnaround came in Minnesota, in fact, when he faced a booing, jeering crowd, and calmly expressed to them his intention to be respectful of Senator Obama despite their deep differences on policy. Even more interesting was his subtle but teacherly insistence that the audience also embrace this respectful view. His gentle insistence that Obama is a "good family man" whom he personally admires was brave beyond what I ever expected.
4. John McCain's concession speech in Phoenix. Running for president must take a crazy amount of ambition, and I'm sure the process offers a multitude of devilish decisions between bad options. McCain seems to have decided a long time ago to wear his heart on his sleeve, in the process acknowledging the ambition and the occasionally dark compromises required by politics. It's a fascinating path to watch, and it also gave the first half of his concession speech a powerful feeling of sincerity. These words in particular point to a vision extending beyond only one election: "In a contest as long and difficult as this campaign has been, [Senator Obama's] success alone commands my respect for his ability and perseverance. But that he managed to do so by inspiring the hopes of so many millions of Americans, who had once wrongly believed that they had little at stake or little influence in the election of an American president, is something I deeply admire and commend him for achieving."
