Obama Makes It Official: “Let’s Get to Work!”

Barack Obama stood in front of the statehouse in Springfield, Ill., where, like him, Abraham Lincoln served and in 1858 gave a speech known to history as “A House Divided.” ("A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved -- I do not expect the house to fall -- but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other.”) It was his justification for campaigning to save the US from its growing sectarianism. For Obama this was the setting for his justification for entering presidential politics – and winning – to save the Union once again by cutting through the partisan crap and bringing about peace and prosperity.

To those who braved the wintry weather and, of course, who were watching on TV, he said: “In the face of war, you believe there can be peace. In the face of despair, you believe there can be hope. In the face of a politics that's shut you out, that's told you to settle, that's divided us for too long, you believe we can be one people, reaching for what's possible, building that more perfect Union.”

Meanwhile, at Hampton University, in Virginia, where Tavis Smiley was hosting his annual talkfest about the state of Black America, one panelist, the Rev. Al Sharpton, said that Obama should have made his announcement there rather than at the house from which Lincoln launched his career. “We’ve got to quit giving the wrong people credit for our history!”

Sharpton’s notion of “we” and “our” is too much of the old school. Obama sees a wider canvas when talking about “we” and “us” – not bound by Black and White. His is, he said in making the announcement that he is campaigning to become the next president of the US, an “improbable quest.” He sounded much like Jack Kennedy, another senator with limited Washington experience, who upon his election in 1960, called upon his generation to take charge. Obama says it’s time for his generation – which I take to be my generation though I am a few years older than he – to answer the call to fix what’s broke in the US by honoring our core values.

"I recognize there is a certain presumptuousness - a certain audacity - to this announcement. I know I haven't spent a lot of time learning the ways of Washington. But I've been there long enough to know that the ways of Washington must change."

He probably hasn’t even thought how much he has to overcome to be heard by people who, even though they watched his speech, seem to have been hearing a different language. One of the first callers to C-SPAN after the speech was a woman who said that the United States did not need a Muslim as president. The call-in host told her that Obama was not a Muslim, that, indeed, he’s a member of the United Church of Christ. The woman said she thought he’d been influenced by some Muhammadism and had changed his name. The host explained that the senator was born with the name Barack Obama.

People are looking for reasons to sully the man before they even get to know him. (See Politico at http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0207/2694.html). Obama, you do, indeed, have to get to work. But so do those who share your vision of “what this country can be.”