2008: The Year of the Crisis

Think of this as Volume 11, Number 52 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

It almost seems too neat, like the solution to a mystery the detective still suspects.

2008 was the year the American crisis of my children's generation crested. Miraculously we found just the right sacrifice for the Gods of history to address it in Barack Obama.

Obama was not my first choice. I did not know enough about him. What I knew was, like the mystery to the detective, too pat.

Was it really possible that we could elect a calm intellectual who intuited everything I have written here, not just about previous crises but about the current one, and who might make the Internet Thesis of Consensus his own?

Yes, we could.

The reason for that can be found in his background. Not the parts everyone likes to talk about — the childhood in Hawaii, the wilderness years at Occidental and Columbia, or the rise through Chicago's machine politics. No, the answer lay in his day job, at the University of Chicago Law School, where he taught Constitutional Law, and (in essence) American political history.

It was this background that allowed him to take what Howard Dean had wrought and run with it. He understood, somehow, that each new generation brings with it a new dominant medium, that the Internet was the medium for his generation, and that the key to its use lay in interaction, not between the center and the crowd but within the crowd. Somehow, he knew that the candidate's role in a campaign is largely symbolic, and that a transformational election would require tactics, not strategy.

He also understood that what worked for the Baby Boomers — a politics based on conflict — could not work for the times we were facing. Despite a liberal voting record he repeatedly reached out across the aisle, both within the party and without, seeking agreement.

And he learned. The candidate who was so halting in early debates became a master of the craft. The man who had never run anything bigger than a Senate office somehow ran the biggest political campaign in American history with no drama, and took the helm figuratively months before he could do so literally.

Rising above is the task for all of us. Rising above our present circumstances. Rising above our trips and dramas, our personal politics and preferences. Looking up is the hard task before us — seeing across the chasm to the other side, and divining what that other side looks like, how different it is from where we are now, fitting ourselves slowly, painfully, to that necessary change.

Coming together.

In retrospect it seems every event of the year helped Obama, and us, toward the present realization.

The collapse of Wall Street, and of an economy based on real estate and speculation. The relative calm in Iraq, which allowed us to see the far more important conflicts within India and Pakistan. The abyss of Africa, where inflexibility leads to mass starvation and death. And the need for continuing American leadership, demonstrated by the failure of German decision-makers to step up to the plate, regardless of their own good intentions.

It was almost as though the seas parted for him, and for us. The nomination of Sarah Palin was just the tonic an otherwise-skeptical American public needed to reject the nonsense of the Republican Party it had believed in for a lifetime, and step into the new era. It was, probably, only Obama's skin color that kept the election relatively close, as southern populists could not throw off the mask of racism behind their own "common man" appeals and jerked their knees as their forefathers had done for over a century and a half.

It was, in other words, a magical time.

Which is why, like the detective, I'm still worried. We have had other magical years in our history, years where the gears clicked and massive changes began.

It happened in 1800, our first competitive election, and in 1828, which gave us our first political party. It happened in 1860, when brothers accepted the need for war on one another, and in 1896, when our industrial political divides were defined for us. It happened in 1932, when we rose up in despair, and in 1968, when we chose to give in to it.

All those crisis years were followed by days of great torment, and turmoil. Jefferson went to war with the pirates, and Jackson held the union together. Lincoln's generation died for our sins, and Teddy Roosevelt's made us a world power. Franklin Roosevelt's Thesis of Unity was tested by Depression and War, Nixon's Thesis of Conflict was almost overthrown by Watergate before winning validation under Ronald Reagan.

My point is that the year of the crisis is just the start of the story. We don't know where this path leads. We only know we have chosen it, and chosen as well as we could. And so, at Christmas Time, we hold our breath as our forefathers did, in their suburbs, their Hoovervilles, on their farms, in their teeming northern cities and mythical frontier towns.

What will the times ahead demand of us? That is the President's job to define and explain. Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States.