Unyielding hope

Wednesday, 5th November 2008

The Spectator on the US Presidential election

One of Robert F. Kennedy’s favourite passages of poetry was drawn from Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’: ‘Come, my friends,/ ’Tis not too late to seek a newer world./ Push off, and sitting well in order smite/ The sounding furrows… strong in will/ To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.’ On 4 November, the American people decided unambiguously to embrace that spirit of hope. Like Ulysses in the poem, John McCain embodied the doughty virtues of the veteran warrior. But it was the chance to ‘seek a newer world’ — the mesmeric promise of ‘change’ — that America voted for in its overwhelming endorsement of Senator Barack Obama.

Throughout his campaign, the President-elect used Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech of August 1963 as an inspiration and a template. Like Dr King, he reminded America repeatedly of ‘the fierce urgency of now’. And in his own biography — the son of a Kenyan goatherd who rose to the most powerful office in the world — he has confronted the challenge set 45 years ago that ‘we cannot be satisfied as long as the Negro’s basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one’.

It is a statement of fact to say that the junior Senator from Illinois has this week given hope to every young American, of whatever background, and to millions more beyond his nation’s shores. Held for 20 years by a member of the Bush or Clinton clans, the presidency was in danger of becoming a tool of dynasty, handed from father to son and husband to wife, rather than the institutional embodiment of a great democracy and its values. The election of Obama as 44th President restores faith in America as a land of absolute possibility.

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Giles Witton

November 10th, 2008 12:05am Report this comment

"Lazy Anti-Americanism" seems to me a misplaced epithet. What is lazy is the use of the term "Anti-Americanism" as a response to any criticism of the American government's policies, thus providing a convenient excuse for not facing up to that criticism.

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