Essay: Invisible Power - 11/4/2008

As I say these words to you, the highest and most sacred rite of democracy is taking place. An overwhelming and secret transfer of power. Thousands of Americans will vote in the few minutes it takes me to share these thoughts with you. By nightfall, something like one hundred and thirty million Americans will have chosen the next leader of the most powerful and perhaps most challenged country in history.

Theodore H. White captured the magic and the meaning of this day best, in his prose poem to democracy, The Making of the President, 1960. “It was invisible, as always,” he began.

“They had begun to vote in the villages of New Hampshire at midnight, as they always do, and all of this was invisible.

“For it is the essence of the act that as it happens it is a mystery in which millions of people each fit one fragment of a total secret together, none of them knowing the shape of the whole.

“What results from the fitting together of these secrets is, of course, the most awesome transfer of power in the world … all committed into the hands of one man.”

When Teddy White wrote those words, a white teenager in Hawaii had just gotten pregnant by her boyfriend, an exchange student from Africa. If the polls are right, the baby she would have that summer will be elected president today.

Forty years ago, when that little boy was going to grade school in Indonesia, a young man was being brutally tortured in a hellish prison. His limbs broken, his teeth knocked out, his head ducked in buckets of sewage. His fellow prisoners didn’t think he would survive.

But he did, and if the polls are wrong, he too may be elected president today. By the way, while we may think we know who is going to win, we really don’t. Our experts have gotten it wrong before, as Presidents Tom Dewey, Alf Landon, and Al Gore can tell you.

I know something about politics; I’ve been writing about them for thirty years, and have met five presidents. Thanks to all my expertise and insight, I was able to explain a year ago that only one thing was certain. The Democrats would never, in this year when they had a real chance to take back power, nominate a black man.

Much less a first term senator who had a name that sounded like that of a terrorist. Nominate a guy whose middle name is Hussain? Well, guess what. However it turns out, that man will get more than sixty million votes today.

Tomorrow, either John McCain or Barack Obama will go back to an important job in the U.S. Senate. And the other will face a national economic crisis that, for Michigan, may be the worst in our history.

As a state and a nation, we have one hell of a task ahead. For once, whoever wins, we really need to come together, and try our best to help the next President live up to the job.

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Comments

[Anonymous]

As I recall, Jack Lessenberry's series of essays for Michigan Radio hadn't yet begun in the days after the 2000 and 2004 elections, both of which Mr. Lessenberry intoned were among the most important of our lifetimes.

But we do have the rather detailed record of his weekly Politics and Prejudices coulmns for the Detroit Metro Times. Naturally, in both of the last two general elections, Mr. Lessenberry weighed in heavily on the side of Democrats John Gore and Al Kerry, or Al Gore and John Kerry; I can't remember their names right now.

What I don't remember, and perhaps someone intimately familiar with the record of Mr. Lessenberry's editorials can assist us all, is a single time when, after the election or re-election of President George W. Bush as 43rd President of the United States, Mr. Lessenberry suggested that it was time for Americans to "come together" under a newly-elected President, and and "try our best to help" him.

Indeed, a writer who adhered to the same low level of gutter-sniping style as Mr. Lessenberry would likely feel empowered to refer to a President-elect Obama as "Chimpy McMuslim," much in the same way that Jack Lessenberry has dipsaraged the President (smirking chimp, shrub, etc.) in the pages of his Metro Times columns.

All in a day's work at Michigan Radio, apparently.

[Thrasher]

Anonymous,

Please have the courage after the election to post here under your real name...

I feel great today knowing I have contributed to the end of white presidential supremacy today!!!

I am so happy my activism and body of work has elected a person of color as our next president..

I am looking forward to working with him in the white house..I will remember the lost souls here in Michigan whose contempt for Black men like me gave me the fuel to make a difference....

Now these same people will be looking up to me and Obama....

[Entusiasmo]

Hey, man, maybe Anonymous IS his real name. Can Thrasher be a real name?

What exactly is your body of work, and which cabinet position are you headed to in O. Hussein's could-be administration?

[Thrasher]

Entusiasmo,

My body of work is extensive feel free to google Greg Thrasher...

I am looking forward to serving the new president in whatever capacity he wants me to..

BTW is Entusiasmo your real name....lol,lol,lol