Why ‘Barry’ Inspires America

Barack Obama’s resonant message of hope has weathered criticism and a never-say-die opponent for the Democratic presidential nomination. May-lee Chai explains why the Illinois senator has her vote.

As former Indonesian schoolboy Barack Obama gave his first victory speech after the Iowa state caucuses, my father’s eyes filled with tears that soon spilled down his cheeks. As Obama evoked civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and assassinated presidential candidate Robert Kennedy, as he spoke of the “audacity of hope,” and the historic moment the United States faced after seven-and-a-half years of one of the most corrupt, incompetent and brutal presidencies in U.S. history, my father stood up and cheered.

My father is 75 years old and, lest anyone get the wrong idea, let me make it clear that he is usually more apt to shout curses in Chinese at the stupidity of the pundits on the TV news than he is to cheer anything. And as far as crying, I haven’t seen anything move him to tears since my mother’s funeral some 10 years ago.

The truth is my father, like millions of other Americans, including me, has been inspired by the promise that Barack Obama offers. That promise is both simple and seemingly impossible. Obama tells us that it’s possible that we can have our country back after the disastrous, demoralizing and often despicable policies of George W. Bush.

The Bush years have not been kind to America, just as they have not been good for much of the world. While the American media has been reluctant to report on the real suffering of the Iraqi people or the chaos that still reigns in Afghanistan because of Bush’s wars, the press has also been whitewashing the damage Bush’s domestic policies have done at home.

After nearly eight years of Bush, America has watched its budget surplus become a 9.4 trillion dollar deficit. Jobs are harder to find and even those of us working full time do not necessarily have benefited positions, which is a euphemism meaning a job with health insurance. No one I know works a mere 40 hours a week; the 60-hour to 80-hour workweek is common.

But wages for 90 percent of Americans have not kept up with inflation. There is real poverty in America, and even before the current home mortgage crisis, homelessness was endemic. I was horrified to discover when I was teaching in a liberal arts college in Massachusetts that some of my students, born in the 1980s, had no idea that homelessness had not always been part of the American experience.

When I was a child in the 1970s, it would have been shocking to hear of large numbers of entire families who were homeless. Yet when my brother taught in a public elementary school in Silicon Valley in California in the late 1990s, during a time of economic boom, his classroom always had two open spaces reserved for homeless students.

That’s how common homelessness has become in America. We’ve institutionalized it, taught our children to accept it as natural, and provided no path out of it for the families who are struggling to survive.

This is not the America of my youth, but it is the America of 2008.

The America of 2008 is a country where CEOs, even of companies that lose money, earn more in one day than their employees earn in an entire year. Billionaire Warren Buffett has famously pointed out that his receptionist pays a higher tax rate than he does. In fact, the middle class pays a higher tax rate than the richest Americans. People who work for a living can pay up to 35 percent in income taxes whereas people who live off interest on their investments, often from inherited wealth, pay only 15 percent.

Currently, 71 percent of the nation’s wealth is concentrated in the hands of 10 percent of the nation. People ought to be outraged, but when you’re one major illness away from destitution, many Americans feel mostly despondent and hopeless.

President Bush’s administration has told us torture is legal, inequity is inevitable and war is just. Every day for seven-plus years this Orwellian newspeak has been drilled into our heads by a frightened press corps who don’t want to lose their jobs.

Thus, when Obama tells us we can be better than this, that we can be a more compassionate society, a more just society, one that does not declare unilateral wars against nations that don’t attack us, a nation that takes care of its citizens, a country that can lead the world in reducing greenhouse gas emissions rather than unilaterally pulling out of environmental treaties, people are moved to tears.

It’s been a long time since anyone has dared to talk this way in our media, in our public sphere, and certainly in our White House.

I think this explains why 75,000 people came out one afternoon in May in Portland, Oregon, waiting for hours in the hot sun, just to hear Obama speak. This is why across America in big cities and small towns, on college campuses and in sports stadiums, crowds the size usually reserved for rock stars have queued up for Obama.

Even now there are naysayers. Democratic rival Hillary Clinton famously derided Obama as “naïve” and, more recently, “unelectable.” She has implied, and once stated outright, that white people won’t vote for him. Yet Obama, a mixed-race black man, has won the majority of votes in many states that are more than 95 percent white. But that is also part of the hope that Obama inspires.

America has had a tangled racial past, to be sure. The nation has endured the genocide of its native peoples, slavery of Africans and their descendents, the denial of citizenship to Asian immigrants and the banning of interracial marriages despite the country’s long history of actual miscegenation. There have been assassinations and lynchings and riots.

However, Obama has given the United States a reason to believe we can overcome this past if we come together and work together for the common good. And millions of Americans are ready to believe him.

Whether this hope we feel today will actually be enough to change the course of our nation’s destiny, to overcome the cynicism and the despair, is impossible to predict. Stay tuned for the general election in November.

San Francisco-based author May-lee Chai wrote about growing up as an Asian-American in the February WEEKENDER.

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