My Life in an Obama Administration, Part II

I’m declaring for Obama in a landslide.

We knew the election results would either be a blowout or closer than expected. Nothing about the 2008 election season was ever middle ground or middle of the road. The 2008 election is nothing less than a battle for the hearts and minds of the American voter, a referendum on the future.

At 8:45 a.m. this morning, I arrived at Holy Family Catholic Church, in the 62nd district of Oklahoma, to cast my vote for Barack Obama. As I approached the church, the parking lot was filled to near capacity, as though a Sunday church service was already in session. But walking through the doors, the sight astounded me. There were about 200 people in line ahead of me, and it would be another 75 minutes until I was inside the auditorium to vote. I would learn that early risers who arrived to vote at 7:00 a.m. would have an even longer wait, an hour and a half. Early voting took place at the courthouse in our city on the previous Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday—the line at the courthouse snaked even longer, with voters waiting an hour and a half to vote. My elderly father showed up at 7:00 a.m. at the Episcopalian church near his home and finished voting in no time flat.

I saw my congressman standing in line, presumably to vote for his own re-election. I was tempted to ask T.W. Shannon—an African-American man, a Republican, and a neighbor—if he would vote the party line or with history. Of the voters I saw, most were middle age or older and white. Fewer than 25% were people of color or college age or younger, and maybe 10 were soldiers in uniform. The time passed more quickly than expected as people engaged in friendly banter and an air of civic-mindedness prevailed. The retiree next to me complained that he hated it when news organizations projected the winner ahead of time; he felt it was a disincentive for people to come out and vote. Most voters arrived singly…there were retirees, farmers, older Asian women, college students, and African-American couples in line. Young families came out together to vote. Mothers with toddlers in tow waited their turn, as did elderly citizens in wheelchairs. Neighbors chatted with neighbors. My neighbor, Linda, who’s married to a psychiatrist, saw me and told me she was looking forward to my next opinion piece. Friends and acquaintances caught up with each other. Here’s a sampling of the conversation I caught:

Middle-age man: “I know you…you used to be the postman who delivered my mail in Chattanooga. I always used to see you at square dancing.”
Retired postal worker: “I never delivered mail in Chattanooga, I did in Faxon.”
Middle-age man: “Well, I saw you at square dancing all the time. I don’t square dance any more…too old. I was the 17th person in line to vote in Faxon at 6:30 a.m. this morning. ”
Me: “Don’t the polls open at 7:00 a.m.? So didn’t you end up waiting about 45 minutes to vote?”
Middle-age man: “Yes, but people who showed up at 7:00 a.m. would have to wait about an hour.”

At 9:57 a.m. I finished voting. Oklahoma’s election ballot is an oversized sheet of paper printed on both sides. Voters draw a straight line in the middle with a felt-tip pen to connect the point of an arrow to the tail end. I felt good as I left the polling place…it was heartening to see so many people who made an effort to vote before their shift at work, spent their lunch time waiting in line, brought their young children with them. Regardless of who was their candidate of choice, voters understood that this was an historical election.

I lived for several years in New Hampshire, with its first-in-the-nation primary. The New Hampshire town of Dixville Notch traditionally tallies the first presidential votes cast in the nation. Obama won in a landslide, which came as something of a surprise. I now live in Oklahoma, which the national media views as the heartland of the new millennium. In 2006—the year my husband and I relocated from New Hampshire to return to the state where my family has lived for more than 40 years—Oprah, The New York Times, Design Star and The Contender featured Oklahoma and Oklahomans; in 2007, Lauren Nelson, a resident of our town was crowned Miss America 2007, and a local family had their dream house built and broadcasted on Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. In 2005, Oklahoma native Carrie Underwood won American Idol and went on to become one of the franchise’s most celebrated alumni.

So what does Barack Obama represent to me, and what would his administration mean to the country? Well, as I have just described, he has brought with him an earnest sense of engagement and civic participation in the political process. To have inspired the fervor that he has means that the electorate would have made an effort to be better informed about the candidates’ position on issues. After what amounts to years and even decades of voter apathy, all these changes can only be for the better.

Certainly, Obama was the beneficiary of acts of god and nature that kept his candidacy afloat, the most compelling being the public’s furor over the sinking economy and the bailout of Wall Street. For too long, under a Republican administration, the heavy-hitting oligarchy was allowed to play fast and loose with the economic system without the necessary and responsible government oversight. When Wall Street failed, the bailout was necessary…virtually everyone was impacted, including Middle Americans with their pensions tied up in retirement plans. Anger over the economy, coupled with the disenchantment with the war in Iraq, proved too much to ignore. Sarah Palin became a drag on the Republican ticket. Has a vice presidential candidate’s qualifications to be commander-in-chief been so derided since George H.W. Bush hand-picked a little-known Indiana congressman to be his running mate? It’s a toss-up between Palin and Dan Quayle. Even voters who might have seemed suspicious of the change that Obama represented came to recognize that change was not a mantra for the sake of change but, rather, a referendum and a recognition that the system could not go on as in the past. John McCain is certainly a maverick, but this quality is most pronounced in his personal conduct rather than in his voting record, which shows a 90%-95% accord with President Bush. McCain is not the systemic change agent needed to overhaul a superannuated bureaucracy.

Obama impressed us all with his riveting speech at the 2004 Democratic convention in Boston. Two years later, he began the long campaign to endear himself to the American public. Along the two-year slog through the Democratic primary season and the general campaign, Obama has made few mistakes. What potential minefields he encountered were the result of questionable associations, from which he quickly distanced himself. In those instances where he did not, notably, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama demonstrated an initial willingness to support his friends and mentors until it was unsustainable to do so.

What I admire most about Barack Obama is that he took a dream—a vision of what American has been and could yet become—so that we could see the potential in buying into his long-range thinking. He brought a fresh perspective to how we could approach the challenges that face our country. He did so through the power of words, his innate ability to articulate and to communicate what other presidents and candidates could not. Yet, his interpersonal and communication skills were honed because he himself spent much of his life at the margins of society. In his background, Obama was as far away from the profile of recent American presidents except for, perhaps, Bill Clinton.

Technically, Barack Obama is not black. He is bi-racial—an important distinction in an increasingly multicultural society—the product of a white mother from the Midwest and a black father from Africa. He grew up without his birth father in his life, raised by a single parent and then later by his white grandparents. His early environment was Hawaii, easily the most diverse state in the country where people of color hold influential roles and positions in all aspects of public life. Obama spent his formative years in Hawaii and in Indonesia, a Southeast Asian republic republic with a Muslim majority; the country is itself at the crossroads of the Pacific Rim.

Once on the mainland, Obama first attended a small, liberal arts college in Los Angeles before transferring to Columbia University in New York City. After graduating from Harvard Law School, he made his way to Chicago where he began to build the base for his political career. By all accounts, Obama's trajectory onto the national stage was meteoric.

I am a foreign-born Asian-American woman. As a person of color, many of my mentors have been African-American. Politically, this is because at the time I first became an activist in the 1970’s and 1980’s, African-Americans were better organized as a result of the Civil Rights movement than was the Asian-American community.

Traditionally, the South Side of Chicago is the nation’s bedrock of Black Power. Politically active and connected, the African-American community here is an influential network that raised and supported Barack Obama like many black politicians before him. While much about Obama’s delivery may come across as elitist and coolly intellectual, his rhythmic intonations and stylings are a product of the old-time sermons, a form of traditional storytelling by black preachers who were looked upon as the paternal head of the community. This is one reason why Obama was unwilling to turn his back on Jeremiah Wright until the former pastor disowned him.

Obama grew up without ever really knowing his father. His lost his mother too soon, when he thought there was still time. The recent death of his grandmother, for all purposes, is the last link to Obama’s former life. But he has reinvented himself. He now has a family of his own and had grafted himself onto a social, cultural, and political context of Black empowerment. The vision was Obama’s own, and he found a way to, methodically, realize his dreams. There are many success stories told by first generation immigrants and racial minorities in America, but this may be the greatest of them all: the audacity of a bi-racial boy raised by a single mother on an island halfway between the American mainland and Asia is on the verge of becoming the first non-white president of the United States. And who can say that Obama is not prepared? By virtue of his excellent education, his political apprenticeship and superlative mentors, his empathy with people on the margins of American life, his own hard work and effort, he has brought us all along for the ride and, in so doing, is guiding us gently and resolutely towards the challenges we face in the future. Ever the collaborator, Obama aims to create a unified country and an inclusive society. In his background and personal narrative is woven the tapestry of America's multi-cultural history. This is why his story resonates...why his time is now...why the outcome is inevitable.

In closing, what does Obama’s election as president, personally, mean to me? More than 13 million Americans are Asian-American, and Filipino-Americans are second only to the Chinese in numbers. I was born in the Philippines, raised in Oklahoma, have lived in California, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New York, Washington, D.C., Oklahoma, Texas, Kentucky, and Georgia, and have an Ivy League education. As an intellectual, writer, artist, and observer who, by virtue of my own experiences, can crawl inside Obama’s brain—does this now mean that I, too, can have a significant global platform? For someone who has remained true to her own voice and artistic vision, does the elevation of a kindred spirit who has shown the entire world the power of prose over conventional plot and characterization now mean that I can get published? Obama’s ascendance means to me that complexity is no longer verboten, and that unique ideas, authenticity, and originality are to be cultivated and celebrated. If all this is true, then—for the first time in my life, in an Obama administration—I can feel as though I were a part of the American mainstream.