on the cover / By Tom Hayden

Dreams of Obama

Transformational president or another disappointment? That’s up to us.

(Aug. 21, 2008)  Barack Obama, it is true, is a transformational leader. But he needs a transformational movement to become a transformational president.

He is transformational not only by his charisma and brilliance, but by embodying the possibility of an African-American being chosen president in the generation following the civil-rights movement. Whether he wins or loses, the vast movement inspired by Obama will become the next generation of American social activists.

GALLERY >

For many Americans, the possibility of Obama is a deeply personal one. I mean here the mythic Obama who exists in our imaginations, not the literal Obama whose centrist positions will disappoint many progressives.

My wife and I have an adopted 8-year old “biracial” boy whose roots are African-American. My adult son is married to an African-American woman with roots in Jamaica and Costa Rica. Our family is part of the globalized generation Obama represents. What is at stake for our kids’ future is real, palpable, not only political. Their future will very much be shaped by the outcome of this election. Millions of people in this country — and around the world — feel similarly affected.

Myths are all-important, as Obama writes in his Dreams from My Father. Fifty years ago, the mythic Obama existed only as an aspiration, an ideal, in a country where interracial love was taboo and interracial marriage was largely banned. In 1960, in my liberal community of Ann Arbor, Mich., our student newspaper exposed the University of Michigan’s dean of women for secretly spying on white coeds seen having coffee with black men in the campus Union and notifying their parents. In those days, too, the vision of an African-American as president was preserved only in a dream state. As Obama himself declared on the night of the Iowa primary, “Some said this night would never come.”

The early civil-rights movement, the jazz musicians and the Beat poets dreamed up this mythic Obama before the literal Obama could materialize. His African father and white countercultural mother dared to dream and love him into existence, incarnate him, at the creative moment of the historic march on Washington. Only the overthrow of Jim Crow segregation then opened space for the dream to rise politically. This collapse was not an engineering feat, like a bridge falling, but the consequence of suffering and martyrdom along with countless invisible feats of organization in the American South.

If this sounds unscientific or, as some would say, cultish, think about it. None of the supposedly expert people in the political, media or intellectual establishments saw this day coming. I didn’t expect it myself, the news was carried to me by a new generation, including my own grown-up children. It was dreamed up and built “beyond the radar” or “outside the box” by experienced dreamers with long histories in community organizing, social movements and not a few lost causes. They were sustained by the stones the builders left out, the movement, “calloused hand by calloused hand,” that Obama refers to.

In one of his best oratorical moments, Obama summons the spirit of social movements that were built from the bottom up, from the Revolutionary War to the abolitionist crusade to the women’s suffrage cause to the eight-hour day and the rights of labor, ending with the time of his birth when the walls came down in Selma and Montgomery, Ala., and Delano, Calif. As he repeats this mantra of movements thousands of times to millions of Americans, a new cultural understanding becomes possible. This is the foundation of a new American story that is badly needed, one that attributes whatever is great about this country to the ghosts of those who came before, in social movements from the margins. Though Howard Zinn may not agree, Obama to a large degree has appropriated Zinn’s “people’s history” model of America as against the conservative narrative that glorifies wars against alien savages as necessary to forge a new democracy in the wilderness, the unbroken story of American exceptionalism, from the colonial forests to the Iraqi deserts, from Custer to McCain. Obama’s emerging narrative also includes but supercedes the other major explanation of American specialness, the narrative of the “melting pot,” by noting that whatever “melting” did occur was always in the face of massive and entrenched opposition from the privileged.

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