Country of Possibilities: Our liberal mandate

My ex writing prof Roger Cohen writes about American Stories in today's NYTimes. How America is the only country on Earth where Obama's story could be possible. Why Obama stands to bring hope and credibility back to the American ideal, its "twin badges" of liberty and capitalism, of equal rights and possibilities for all-- races, religions, nationalities, classes, sexualities-- that America is supposed to represent. Undermined by 8 years of Bush conservatism, and the cartoonishly fundamentalist "Good versus Evil" world view that goes with it.

Roger's take on Obama made me think of my dad's favorite historian Joe Ellis, who writes the following in his great latest book "American Creation".

"America's founding succeeded [in that] against all odds, the most liberal nation-state in the history of Western Civilization was now firmly embedded in the most extensive and richly endowed plot of land on the planet. The plot itself was providential, a function of geographic and chronological good fortune. The political shape of the emerging American nation was a more human creation, flawed as all human creations must be, most notably in its prevailing racial prejudices and its inability to envision the multicultural ideal we now take for granted.
"But the design of the political foundation was ingenious in its combination of stability and agility, most especially its prudent placement of an explanding liberal mandate at the start that left room, up ahead, for an Abraham Lincoln and a Martin Luther King to join the list of founders. In that sense, perhaps the most creative act of the founding era was to make time as well as space an indispensable ally, in effect extending the founding moment everlastingly into the future." (

Next Tuesday could be America's 21st century founding moment, and we will be a part of it. I'm convinced if Obama is elected, America's "expanding liberal mandate" will have taken a historic leap that will be remembered forever in the history of our founding-- a leap towards a globalist, progressive, genuinely egalitarian world society. When another Joseph Ellis comes along in 300 years, Obama and the diplomatic, open outlook he'll bring to American foreign policy, will be added to that list of liberalism's founding moments. We're here, now, to be a part of it. We can describe it to our kids and grandkids when they read it in their history books. Our potentially multi-lingual, multi-colored American kids, whose world, thanks to the ever-expanding power of the Internet, will be so much bigger than ours has ever been able to be.

With hope.
T