When America's founding revolutionary fathers got together in Philadelphia in 1776 to declare their independence from the British crown, they did not do so with a clear view of the road which lay ahead. Thay had no map or guide for the journey they were about to undertake, no certain formula for success. They had only the courage of their convictions, and a burning desire for something new. So it has been with all great leaps forward in history, and so it is with the challenge to which we are called today.
That American revolutionary spirit has been reawakened today by Barack Obama and the movement that has grown up around his campaign for president. Make no mistake: this campaign is no mere "cult of personality" as some of its detractors have painted it. It is a genuine movement for change of which Obama is the catalyst, but which is fueled by the aspirations of the people themselves who have made it happen, and motivated by serious concerns regarding the future of our nation and our world. Ultimately it is not about Obama, but about us. It requires, however, a certain willingness to leave conventional wisdom behind and take a brave step forward into uncharted political territory.
The spirit in which the United States was born was not a spirit of striving always to make everything as safe and predictable as possible, not one of seeking to reduce human aspirations to a mathematical formula or a five-step plan for certain success. For some time now, however, the latter seems precisely the mindset to which we have consigned ourselves as a culture and a society. We have, at least since the 1980s, become the "zero-risk society," the security society, always on the lookout for the safest, most predictable answer to any question. Ergo the Hillary Clinton and John McCain campaigns, each seeking to battle it out with the other for the title of Most Predictable. Clinton's campaign for Most Predictable is guided largely by strategist Mark Penn, a number cruncher for whom politics is merely a form of market research. The last time our better, more adventurous side showed itself was with the great social and cultural movements of the 1960s - an era strongly echoed in the movement for change that has grown up around the Obama campaign, and indeed in Obama himself. It is for good reason that Obama is so often compared to such leaders of that era as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy.
The American revolutionaries of 1776, like those of 1968, were called to take a step beyond the conventional wisdom of their times, to seek new ways of thinking about politics and culture and society. They stood, however, in a great tradition of breaking boundaries that dates in Western civilization to the ancient Greeks who invented democracy 2500 years ago. In all their inventiveness the Greeks constantly reached for the unknown, leaving conventional wisdom behind as quickly as it became convention. The adventurous spirit of Athens which lay dormant through much of the Middle Ages was reborn in the era of the Renaissance and Reformation, a revolutionary age of discovery that among many other things would give birth to the New World of the Americas as we know it today. The great minds of that era - Leonardo, Luther, Magellan, Galileo - sought like the ancient Greeks to venture across the boundaries of the known world to the unknown beyond. That spirit of adventure would make itself felt again in the Enlightenment and the age of the American and French revolutions, when Athenian democracy would be reborn for the modern world; and in the Civil Rights era and Space Age of the 1960s.
Barack Obama's campaign rests on the proposition that we have reached a point in our history at which we can no longer rely on the conventional formulae and ways of doing things to which we have become accustomed, indeed in which we have become entangled. We have reached a point at which planetary concerns, questions regarding the future direction of American foreign policy, the problem of increasing poverty and inequality, and the question of ultimately what kind of world we are leaving to future generations, can simply no longer be ignored or put off for tomorrow. We have reached a point at which what appears to be the safe, predictable choice may in fact be a tragic and even dangerous case of missed opportunity. In short, we need a revolution of ideas, something the Mark Penn school of politics to which Hillary Clinton subscribes is simply not in the business of "managing"; something John McCain and the Republican Party are in the business of preventing by any means necessary.
Barack Obama has united people across all demographic, geographic, and partisan lines in a grassroots movement for change that neither John McCain nor Hillary Clinton could have predicted. While Clinton's appeal is limited mainly to a base of admirers whose opinions more-or-less match her own, Obama has won the support of people both far to his left and far to his right, people who may strongly disagree with him on significant issues but who see in his campaign a real opportunity for progress. In doing so, he not only beats Clinton in electability against McCain but also uniquely promises both to expand the base of the Democratic Party and to bring a new generation of young Americans into political participation. In my opinion, he couldn't have come along at a better time.
Mark C. Eades
http://www.mceades.com
