It was a few years ago when I wrote a
column about a newcomer on the national scene. The column ran in The Orlando
Sentinel. Years have passed, and it all came true. The face is the same, sort of, but some of the pixels have rearranged themselves. Read on:
Americans are often on the move. The
one-time Hawaii resident ran for the U.S. Senate in Illinois, where he won by a
wide margin. Obama now serves alongside the venerable Sen. Daniel K. Inouye of
Hawaii.
Obama would have qualified for
membership in the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick in Honolulu in the 1950s, when
men with names like Ohata, Okada and Okino were welcome participants in annual
corned beef and cabbage events.
Anybody who heard Obama’s address at
the 2004 Democratic National Convention, his hymn to democracy and the
integrity that makes it work, may have wondered whether this man might make it
to the White House. It took about 180 years for a Catholic to be elected, and
no woman has ever been elected regardless of her race, religion or political
party.
The first African American to be
elected president will be Obama or someone very much like him, someone who is
proud of his race who wants to lead an interracial nation, a country in which
everybody belongs to some kind of minority – the elderly, the disabled, the
unemployed, the Catholics, Jews, Muslims, even the Cubs fans. He’d have to win
enough votes from Americans of European, Hispanic, Asian and other ancestries
to get there.
Spirited words by Sen. Obama,
delivered in Springfield, Illinois, at the dedication of the Abraham Lincoln
Presidential Museum, were recalled by Jeff Zeleny, national political
correspondent for the Chicago Tribune in an article June 26. They received less
attention than they merited at the time because, Zeleny reported, the senator
had barely finished speaking when the election of a new pope took over the
front pages. Here’s some of what Obama said about Lincoln:
“At a time when image all too often
trumps substance, when our politics all too often feeds rather than bridges
division, when the prospects of a poor youth rising out of poverty seem of no
consequence to the powerful and when we evoke our common God to condemn those
who do not think as we do, rather than to seek God’s mercy for our own lack of
understanding – at such a time it is helpful to remember this man who was the
real thing.”
The papal election may have grabbed
the headlines at that moment, but it stirred memories of Pope John Paul II. His
Polish ancestry was a joy to him, and he met with men and women of Polish
ancestry wherever he traveled in the world – but he was not the pope of the
Poles. He was everybody’s pope. Obama can be everybody’s president.
When I was a first-grader, 75 years
ago, my hero was Lincoln. The first book I bought with the first half-dollar I
earned was about Lincoln.
When I see Sen. Obama on my TV screen
I see a bit of Lincoln. That’s before the beard, of course.
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