Reflections of History

Posted by Jake G. on 01.20.2009

My personal piece of the Obama inauguration.

I'm sure today, this history making day, will be filled with lots of posts and opinions on the first African American President of the United States. Myself, I feel overwhelmed with the historical implications of the ceremony today and the fact that I was a part of this movement that led to this moment. Here is my personal piece of history.

I suppose I should preface by saying I voted for Barack Obama this past November. I cast my ballot proudly, without fear, that I was voting for the best man for the job. It was an interesting choice because it wasn't one that was predetermined by me. I suspected the race would have been between Clinton and Giuliani. Given the choice between the two, early on, I wasn't sure who I'd vote for. However as the campaign season began to unravel, it quickly became apparent that the Democrats had a strong field of challengers to the throne and the Republicans had easily the worst crop in decades. Giuliani was quickly exposed as a joke and a fraud while Mitt Romney looked to clinch his party's nomination.

Then something strange happened, be it religious implications or lack of a noteworthy candidate, but the Republicans jumped off Romney's ship, decided to leave Huckabee and picked McCain, who up to that point had barely struggled to even make the campaign competitive. It was a sad pick, with McCain clearly not being the choice of the Republicans, but they had decided to try him anyway. It just went to prove how awful of a field of candidates they had to chose from when McCain limped across the finish.

Then began the tight race for the Democratic nomination that finally saw Obama win. I was reluctant at first to believe if Obama could win the Presidency. He was obviously the better of the two candidates by a far margin, but the race war began to flare it's ugly head. The whole "race" became about race, or so many were led to believe.

Historically I look back and wonder how idiotic the people who voted for McCain will feel in ten, maybe twenty years. Not the ones who voted for him because they truly thought he was great and trust me, those were few and far between... But the ones who voted for him simply because he wasn't the "other one". Imagine telling your kids or grand kids in the future that you remember when the first black President was elected, but you voted for the clueless old white guy instead. Instead of voting for the person who had game plans, strategies and a clear focus, you voted for a man who maniacally squealed "The Mac is back" over and over during his last hours running for the highest office in the land. As if his entire campaign was a sham but in the last days the real "Mac" was back and we should vote for him because of that.

To me, that's one of the most incredible elements. I was a part of history. I was there, I made that happen. I was part of a movement bigger than myself. Imagine if you could have been one of the men who cast a vote for Lincoln. Walked alongside Martin Luther King. Now imagine how foolish the people who marched against MLK or voted against Lincoln felt in retrospect. Perhaps they didn't live long enough to see it in retrospect, but certainly their grand kids did. It's a scary thing to be on the wrong side of history.

A mere 48 hours before Barack Obama won the election, I had the honor to meet the man at one of his campaign stops. I was lucky to be there and had only attended as a last minute decision but it turned out to be one of the most historic moments in my life. Imagine my surprise when I saw there were somewhere in the neighborhood of 40,000 people there to see the man. You could smell a movement in the air. We were on the cusp of something incredible. My surprise continued as I saw that most of the crowd was white, that Obama was not purely the "black" candidate. He was the people's candidate. White people, black people, Latino people, old people, young people, rich people, poor people, all together for one cause, one single historic movement. I truly understood the historical implications then. I got to hear Barack speak an impassioned speech and shook his hand. It was a nice moment, made even sweeter as it was recorded by a local news station and thus cemented for all time. Now my kids and my grand kids can actually see the footage of me meeting the first black President literally hours away from being elected. They can see that I was there, that I was part of that history.

Today is a historic day, no matter how you voted or how you feel about Obama, you must recognize this. Barack may not turn out to be a great president, although I think the bar has been set pretty low by our past few. What he will be forever, good or bad, is the first president who was elected when race no longer mattered. It was a factor, but it didn't prevent him. For the 43 Presidents before him, his journey was impossible. However through people like myself and millions of others, history was made. I'm proud to be a part of it.