The coming Obama landslide is a direct result of the financial panic, and the two candidates’ reaction to it.
But there remained uncertainty until this week, when Tootie sealed the deal.
Tootie is the nickname of Madelyn Dunham, now 85. She’s Obama’s grandmother. She’s the lady on the left in this Chicago Tribune picture, taken in 1979.
She not only helped raise her grandson, whom she usually called Barry, but she gave him the example of a strong, executive woman who could come out of her suit after work, throw on a muumuu, and become grandma again.
Madelyn is now gravely ill, and so Barack Obama has taken a few days off from campaigning to see her, to become Barry again.
How does this seal the deal?
Conventional wisdom will note that Mrs. Dunham is white, or that this
injects Obama’s biography back into the campaign. It’s an inspiring
biography, completely non-elitist, marked with the rewards Americans give
naturally to people who work hard — a good education and a chance to
better themselves.
But that’s not it. This visit re-humanizes the candidate at a crucial
time. He has already shown that he can fit the suit, that he can
perform the ceremonial roles of the American Presidency, that he has
the intellectual chops to actually do the job, because he has managed a
large organization — the largest in the history of American politics
— without a single glitch or even a press leak.
Now we need to know that we can be comfortable with him, that he is, in
fact, one of us. Just while McCain is going on about Obama being
elitist, about him feeling better than us, off he goes to a little
apartment in Honolulu to be with his grandmother, with the woman who
helped raise him, and all the lessons of her life come flooding back to
us in ways that can make you cry.
The important changes in American politics do that. They tear at our
emotions in various ways. Reagan did that. Kennedy’s death did that.
Roosevelt did that. Sometimes the tears are of sorrow, sometimes of
joy, but our greatest leaders find a way to pull these things out of
us, by inspiring us in small ways to do the right thing.
That’s what Barack Obama is doing today. He is doing the right
thing. I wasn’t there when my dad passed, and my wife wasn’t there when
her dad passed. There is tremendous human emotion at these times,
emotion that is completely divorced from politics, but emotion we all
feel, and we know he feels.
I can’t remember a campaign, in all my life, that has gone this well,
this perfectly, without drama, especially at such a highly dramatic time. This was the
problem with Barack Obama’s campaign. It was beginning to feel a little
bloodless, a little too pat, too easy, and that could easily have fed
into a charge of elitism, of difference, and then into the race thing.
Then, with less than two weeks to go before election day, the candidate
flies thousands of miles because his grandma is sick.
And so we think of
her life story, we think of her husband’s, and their daughter’s. They were all, each of the Dunhams, the better angels of our nature, doing
the right thing without a second thought, simply because it is the
right thing. Doing what all of us most want to do, making the children
we raise into gifts for the world, hoping they can change the world,
move history forward just a little bit in the right direction. (The picture at left was taken back in 2000.)
If your heart isn’t moved by all that you don’t have one. If your heart
isn’t moved by that go ahead and vote the straight Republican ticket.
But I guarantee, at this point, that you’re in the minority.
