Who would have thought that Grant Park in central Chicago would give this Englishman two of his most inspirational moments? I was there in person for one of them – the start of the great Chicago Marathon; and in spirit for the other – Barack Obama’s word-perfect acceptance speech, delivered just an hour or so after California turned in the seats that pushed the Democrats past the crucial 270 mark. I watched the speech live on TV, at around four-thirty this morning, overwhelmed by the sense of the moment.
Just like the speech itself, it will all end in tears. As Enoch Powell pithily remarked: “All political careers end in failure”. It’s hard to separate a fellow from the attractions of hope however, and this is why we persist in hailing the promise of new political eras. Does that seem unduly cynical? It’s meant to sound a distant note of realism to accompany the epochal hyperbole, and the universal clamour surrounding Barack’s beatification. I am as desperate as anyone for his presidency to succeed, but I worry that expectations may have risen to an impossible altitude. And the greater the hope, the greater the potential disappointment. It’s unlikely to be Obama’s personal qualities that will be his undoing – he appears to be as sure-footed a politician as I have witnessed in a long time. But it’s hard not to worry about the consequences of conservative bitterness. Someone will be on hand to leap on every lapse; to ridicule and distort every policy movement and conjure up scary extrapolations.
Despite the inevitability of all that, I’m determined to enjoy the moment for as long and as far as I can stretch it. And even if Obama eventually crashes and burns, as nearly all politicians must, the very fact of his ascendancy, and his achievement in persuading more than 50% of voters to put a black man in the White House, is something that will never be undone or rewritten. The genie of personal awareness and self-confidence is out at last, and can never be pushed back into the bottle. The revelatory reassessment of self, and the meaning of potential, are explosive bursts of thought. Carefully managed, they have the power to liberate a generation, and to reinvent a string of cultures across the planet. Coming just a few days after Lewis Hamilton won the Formula One world championship, it’s a good moment to be black. And by extension, a good moment for all of us.
This afternoon I went for a 6 mile Obama celebration run along the damp canal towpath. I needed to thrash myself a little, to clear my head and wake myself up after a long, emotional night. But it was hard to push the news from my mind. I reflected that, in the 7 years of this website’s existence, we have known only the bumbling, incompetent, self-serving George W Bush as US president. Listening to McCain’s dignified and gracious concession speech, and Obama’s inspirational acceptance, reminded me that there are American politicians out there who can be genuinely articulate, coherent, and inclusive. Truly, I had forgotten this.
It was a pretty good run on a cool, but not cold, afternoon. I struggled a little at around mile five, but made it to 6.14 miles with just one brief walk break. As with Saturday’s Sussex outing, there were stretches where I felt strong and almost agile. Almost. My weight is continuing to drop, though I won’t detail it just now. I keep meaning to devote an entry to the topic of weight loss, but it seems disrespectful to pollute the sanctity of the Obama entry with an exposition on the fluctuating magnitude of my arse.
