Last month, when The Post endorsed Barack Obama, I dissented due to concerns that the first-term senator lacked experience and hadn’t paid his dues.
I thought the Democrats deserved the White House after the Bush years, but I argued Hillary Clinton was better tested, more bipartisan and the better choice.
My argument was the classic, he-hasn’t-bled-enough argument that many were making, and many will continue to make (including me, if Obama mucks it up).
So as someone who wanted to vote for Obama but who voted for the more experienced John McCain, how do I react to the sweeping victory?
By congratulating Obama.
And also by congratulating McCain, who made me extremely proud Tuesday night. The man McCain was on Election Day is the man he should’ve been more often on the campaign trail.
I wish to live in the America that Obama and McCain talked about that historic night, a country in which we’ve put our divisive racial history behind us and where small-minded and mean-spirited biases wither and die. (Of course, it’s not that simple, but — as they say — it is a dream worth fighting for.)
Yes, Obama is inexperienced. But Tuesday night he showed us undeniable proof that he has the power to unite. No reasonable person can deny that Obama ran a smart and stunningly effective campaign. Obama’s call for change broke through barriers in ways no one expected. He redrew the electoral map and won a convincing and thorough victory in a country that had become so sadly accustomed to nail-biters that many believed our system was hopelessly and cynically rigged.
We saw even more. McCain’s gracious concession speech and Obama’s humble articulation of the American dream made me as proud as I’ve ever been to live in this country. How nice it would be if the kind of mutual understanding we saw in those speeches permeated the critical discourse that now must take place as a new leadership takes control of our broken government.
Because of that confluence of events, and because I would like to see more civility in our national discourse, I wish to give Obama the benefit of the doubt. I hope that others who weren’t able to get on board for his historic campaign also will agree.
We ought to give Obama a chance to prove himself. We owe it to ourselves, and to Obama’s exceptional intelligence and talents, to hold him to a high standard.
We ought to extend this civility minus the blind faith we extended to such things as dot-coms that argued for a new economy but forgot to make money; the raw patriotism in the aftermath of 9/11 that plunged us into Iraq looking for weapons that didn’t exist; or the gambles of the mortgage industry drunk on the idea that the American housing market never would fail.
We ought to get past this pattern of mass hypnosis we’ve fallen prey to so many times in recent years and demand more of Obama and the Democratic leadership than these simple calls for change. Calling for change is just too easy after eight years of the cocky brush-cutter and a Republican Party that dismantled itself by gleefully disregarding its own principles the way a frat boy might as soon as his parents drive away from campus.
So there. I’m on board. Guardedly.
Now, is it too much to ask that we get over all this lofty speechifying and weak-in-the-knees images of crowds adoring him, as if at the feet of the Messiah?
It was a really, really long campaign. A party or two more, please, and then let’s see some serious executive action. We’ve got problems that all the pretty words in the world aren’t going to solve.
Chuck Plunkett: 303-954-1333 or cplunkett@denverpost.com
