Theda Skocpol gets personal about the coming election.
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The Election of Our Lives
By Theda Skocpol - August 28, 2008, 11:50AM
Tonight at Mile High will be extraordinary, I am sure; and I am so pleased that my twenty-year-old son Michael, heading the Brown Daily Herald news team, will be there to witness Obama's acceptance speech. But for me personally it would be hard to top last night at the Democratic Convention, listening to Bill Clinton and Joe Biden set the stage for Obama and bring the nation and the Democratic Party to the brink of the most important political watershed in the past four decades.
As Michigan State college students in 1966 and 1967, my hustand-to-become Bill and I met while working on a Civil Rights project in Mississippi. We participated in a small way in the fight for American fulfillment through the enfranchisement of blacks and in the repudiation of racial segregation that our generation helped to junp-start. Then, in 1968, we cried with millions of others when the hopes of the era took a dark turn after the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy. We watched as increasingly viscious right-wingers tore blacks from whites, and pitted the middle class against the less privileged -- all the while constructing a predatory U.S. state by and for the crassest of the super rich, and bringing our politics to a shameful nadir that McCain has now embraced, to his ever-lasting shame.
It is such a privilege to be alive to see the turning point in 2007 and 2008, to participate in this chance for Americans to take back our country and for Democrats to overcome the divisions of the past and lead the way to a better future at home and in the world. At last, Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton came through full-bore with their moving speeches of the past two days. They posed the huge stakes in this election and passed the baton of leadership to Obama and new generations of Democrats. And, bless him, Joe Biden gave moving voice to the potential marriage of white and black middle-class aspirations that can come to fruition in a more united and just nation, a country that stops rewarding unprincipled excess and uses its resources to enable the talents of contributions of everyone. Thanks to both Clintons and the Bidens, and to the many other leaders who have spoken with passion and toughness at the Convention. Now it is up to the rest of us to make it happen across the land. Obama can lead, but he cannot do it alone.
Until after November 4, 2008, this is the last of personal reflection or simple analysis for me. Any more I have to say as a citizen political scientist will be about the stakes of the election for most Americans, and about the grievous shortcomings of the current dishonorable version of John McCain.
It is time for all of us -- professional experts and commentators, too -- to cease self-importance (listen up, Carville) or distanced and pallid commentary (that means you Harold Ford and Mark Shields) and join the fight of our lives. This election matters like only a few others in the history of the United States. Our nation will either move forward, or fall down very far -- think of what it will mean in and about America if we cannot grasp the bright potential Obama's candidacy embodies! The battlefield has been set, and all of us should network, speak, write, give money, and do whatever we can to achieve the November victories for Obama/Biden and Democrats all down the ticket that offer the opening wedge toward a better tomorrow.
Each of us will be remembered for what we do -- or do not do -- in this time. Media pundits should stop nonsense about body language and personal quarrels. Journalists should clarify issues and stakes (as Jeff Toobin did this morning). Citizens should engage, and progressive-minded experts should use their intelligence and capacities to argue for the best in American democracy.
And one other thing: any of us from the progressive side of academia who runs into Sean Wilentz after that execrable smear-job he wrote in Newsweek, should cross to the other side of the street and keep moving!
tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com |
