One of the better commentaries on Obama Victory

Obama Takes His Outside Game to the Inside
Bloomberg, 6-Nov-08
By Margaret Carlson

How fast we journalists move so as not to be left behind or be seen as sentimental.

I expect a story any minute that President-elect Barack Obama is moving too fast, or not fast enough. That his first hire, that of Representative Rahm Emanuel as White House chief of staff by way of the Clinton Administration, is a sign he's just a hack. That he isn't doing enough to grasp the gracious olive branch extended by the man he defeated, Senator John McCain. The puppy he promised his daughters is the wrong breed.

It's coming. It always does.

For a day at least, let's stop and celebrate the improbable assumption of the highest office in the land by this outsider with no birthright, no connections, no mentors. Lyndon Johnson had Sam Rayburn. Harry Truman had the Pendergast gang. Dwight Eisenhower had George Marshall and the Lodges. John F. Kennedy had his dad. Ronald Reagan was mentored by an entire movement looking for a new face.

Obama's would-be rabbis came to him in Chicago and tried to persuade the community organizer to abandon his first bids for office. He once went to a Chicago bigwig and was asked who sent him. ``Nobody,'' Obama answered. ``We don't want nobody nobody sent,'' he was told.

At the 2000 Democratic convention, he couldn't get a floor pass. He couldn't even cadge an invitation to the Illinois delegation's parties. He watched most of the speeches on television. He left early.

Unknown Obama

In 2004, he got a speaking part at the convention but not when the networks were broadcasting. Still, the speech was so captivating, he entered the Fleet Center in Boston unknown and left a local hero. The delegates cheered. Cops reached out to shake his hand. The party sent money for his Senate race.

His 15 minutes was interrupted as he made his way home the next day on the $285 ticket he had purchased himself. He was pulled out of line to be frisked for flying while black with a Muslim name.

Even as he won his Senate seat, the skinny kid with the funny name was an island of one belonging to no easily recognizable group. His father grew up in a tin hut in Kenya. His Kansan flower-child Mom, who rose at 4 a.m. to tutor her son, turned him over to his grandparents at age 10 while she finished a graduate degree in anthropology.

They were Kansans who ended up in Hawaii: Obama's grandfather, who fought in World War II, was an outgoing furniture salesman; his grandmother, whom he spied watching him shoot hoops from their two-bedroom condo, worked her way up from secretary to vice president of a bank, saving enough along the way to send Obama to the best private schools.

Role of Race

In his early days running for president, the party and the presumption of success belonged to Senator Hillary Clinton, who initially claimed the lion's share of the black vote as well. He was too black for some in the white power structure, too white for many African-Americans who couldn't identify with someone nobody in the civil-rights movement sent. Obama pointed out that when he hailed a cab, he was black.

Race played a role in the election, but not the one we expected. Obama won more than 90 percent of the black vote, but Al Gore came close to that, the difference being how many cried casting their ballots Tuesday. People who said race was important to them, voted for Obama. People who said it wasn't important voted for Obama. He won more white votes than John Kerry.

Somewhere some couldn't bring themselves to vote for Obama because he's black, but they are a minority in this country now.

Avoiding the Personal

As a loner, Obama didn't run a predictable campaign, mouth the standard lines, get personal. In September, he passed up an easy three-pointer as the momentum was shifting to McCain, and Governor Sarah Palin was a fresh shooting star. When asked about the newly revealed pregnancy of Palin's 17-year-old unwed daughter, he didn't sniff ``no comment'' as if a pile of manure beyond acknowledgement had been set before him. He said it had no relevance.

``My mother had me when she was 18,'' he said. ``How family deals with issues and teenage children, that shouldn't be the topic of our politics.'' It didn't matter that Republicans would have had a field day had positions been reversed. Whoever started the dirty fighting, someone had to stop it.

He had help in toppling the barrier as old as America itself: from McCain who lost his way with a running mate 60 percent of the country didn't trust to be president; from two wars; and from a crumbling economy. A friend said that if the cost of electing Obama was losing 80 percent of her 401(k), it was worth it.

All for One

On the eve of the election in Manassas, Virginia, where battles once were fought to keep blacks as slaves, almost 100,000 people came to an open field to hear Obama. The remarkable part of the evening wasn't Obama's speech but that a fully integrated crowd in the Confederate home state of Robert E. Lee heard it.

Unlike a high-school cafeteria, a church, or many neighborhoods, blacks and Latinos were sprinkled throughout, elbow to elbow, mingling happily. It was a county fair without the prize bull and cotton candy, a wedding without the bride, the Fourth of July and the World Series rolled into one.

And so it was Tuesday night in Grant Park in Chicago, as the outsider became the ultimate insider and begins the humbling task of repairing the country. We are not ``red states and blue states,'' Obama said. ``We are and always will be the United States of America.''

Margaret Carlson, author of ``Anyone Can Grow Up: How George Bush and I Made It to the White House'' and former White House correspondent for Time magazine, is a Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions expressed are her own.