It was a long and arduous journey, but the transition of power is now under way. George W. Bush received Barack Obama at the White House. America is moving toward a new period of change. The change promises to be dramatic.
For the past eight years, America suffered through one of the most turbulent and divisive periods in its history. The rise of neoconservatism violently propelled America and the rest of the world to the brink of global war. Designed by radical ideologues, America’s response to 9/11 backfired. Every move George W. Bush made enhanced the stature of Osama Bin Laden and increased the prestige and strength of Al Qaida. While the international response to Bush’s neoconservative ideology was frigid, the domestic response divided America more deeply than any time since the Civil War.
On the day before the election, with the hope of positive change and the promise of progress echoing concavely in my inner ear, I drove to Charlotte to attend the penultimate rally for Barack Obama. Only one day before had I learned that Obama’s final push would take place at my old alma mater, UNCC. I rang a classmate, Rev. Harold Pulley, who worked with our group of political activists in support of Robert F. Kennedy during our final semester before graduation in 1968, and we agreed to attend the rally at UNCC.
Nineteen sixty-eight brought an explosive spring when a friend of ours was killed in a brutal and senseless murder-suicide on campus. Two weeks later, Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis, and the news of his death threw a pall over our idealistic campus. That summer, our class staggered forward in support of Gene McCarthy until the Chicago police riots divided America into two cultural camps: law and order conservatives and anti-war liberals. That autumn Hubert Humphrey made a strong comeback with his stirring Salt Lake City speech calling for peace in Vietnam. America experienced a jolt of political adrenalin as Humphrey surged back in the polls to threaten Nixon’s cynical and racist Southern Strategy. In the end, Humphrey lost the popular vote by a tiny margin when many Americans expected him to win that contentious election.
During the Watergate Era, North Carolina was transfixed as one of our own, Senator Sam J. Ervin, Jr. led America back from Nixon’s personal megalomania that had brought America a dangerously imperial presidency. Ervin and his capable staff led by Sam Dash and Rufus Edmisten invoked the constitution to topple Nixon with the assistance of John Dean and Alexander Butterfield who revealed the existence of Nixon’s secret taping system that would lead to his downfall and disgrace.
In 1976, America was ready for the change that had been blocked by the Nixon-Ford presidencies, and Jimmy Carter swept to power in one of the most thrilling political charges of modern times when the one-term governor of Georgia led an insurgent progressive movement that delivered its promises for change: environmental protection, affirmative action, equal rights, human rights, the Camp David Accords and a foreign policy predicated on diplomacy rather than knee-jerk military interventions punctuated by clumsy covert operations, assassinations and coups d’etat. While Carter’s progressive presidency delivered the justice and rights he had promised, the US economy sagged under the curse of inflation – a condition inherited from the Nixon-Ford administration.
When the Iranian Revolution led to the seizure of the US Embassy and fifty-three hostages in Tehran, Ronald Reagan and George Bush cynically seized the opportunity to divide America across a political fault line that reincarnated Nixon’s Southern Strategy and led to a twelve year period of arms building, bellicosity and ill-advised military interventions in Grenada and Libya. That was not all, for Reagan and Bush introduced America to the rise of Supply Side Economics that were merely the re-branding of laissez faire capitalism. Reaganomics signaled the arrival of a new generation of Robber Barons thinly disguised as pinstriped gangsters of Wall Street who indulged in insider trading and the shameless plunder of pension funds.
When America learned that Reagan’s foreign policy was riddled with unconscionable levels of deceit – the illegal sale of arms to the revolutionary government of Iran and illegal arms sales to terrorists called “Contras” operating Nicaraguan death squads – the president pleaded his embarrassing ignorance. After the broadcast of videos of Reagan sleeping through cabinet meetings and the publication of stories about the First Lady and her official astrologer, America largely believed her now admittedly incompetent president.
Iran Contra did not stop George H. W. Bush from directing a brazenly racist campaign for the presidency in 1988 that extended the Reagan period to its ignominious conclusion. In 1992 Bush headed a fourth Reaganite campaign that ran up against Bill Clinton who marshaled his message of change. Clinton’s eight years in power saw the restoration of the US economy in the longest and most aggressive surge of prosperity in world history. While America and its glittering corporations prospered, the distribution of wealth followed the pattern of nations in the third world: the rich got richer, and the poor got poorer. Clinton’s attempts to expand the promise of equal rights to the realm of healthcare foundered costing him political capital that led to a presidency of social stagnation in juxtaposition to the rising Reaganite plutocracy of billionaires accumulating massive amounts of capital dwarfing the holdings of the American middle classes.
 After a promising start of diplomatic resolutions of problems with North Korea and Haiti that were negotiated by Jimmy Carter, Clinton’s foreign policy devolved to the Reaganite model of rapid-fire military interventions. Clinton’s major accomplishments were the peace treaty between the Irish and the British, and the cessation of ethnic-cleansing in the Balkans. The largest disappointment of Clinton’s foreign policy was his failure to broker peace in the Middle East that left a suppurating wound for the next administration. Under Clinton, the bipartisan US expansion of NATO became a strategy to encircle Russia that would set the stage for clashes between Putin and Bush that have recently seen the reinstitution of the Cold War in the final year of the Bush administration.
In 2000, the presidency was blatantly stolen following a deft series of post-election maneuvers that shocked America and the world. After their inauguration, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney promptly darkened the skies of America and trampled on the Constitution. Their crude abuses of power led to public distrust and a steady decline in the polls, but at a convenient moment when their popularity was cratering -- 9/11 delivered a convulsive shock to the American body politic. Neoconservative ideology reigned ascendant when America conceived a manufactured lie -- that her only path to security was military domination of the world and direct control of its sources of energy.
Inspired by paranoia that was fuelled by the tenets of neoconservatism and the theology of extreme Christian Zionists, unscrupulous Republican operatives dared to rig elections and to manage perceptions of their toxic policies via propaganda designed to confuse that segment of the American population that Lincoln’s famous dictum proclaimed could be fooled, “all of the time.” With their shriveling base gripped in the thrall of Karl Rove’s brand of paranoid propaganda for extremists and the information-deprived, Bush and Cheney set about de-coupling America from the burdens of international law and what they saw as a troubling trifle, a document they deemed to be a mere piece of paper otherwise known as the Constitution.
A concentration camp for Muslims in Guantanamo brought shame upon America’s now flickering prestige. Secret prisons in foreign nations became torture chambers for uppity Muslims who protested the inequities of US foreign policy. Thousands of American Muslims were arrested, and thousands of them are missing unto this very day. Seeking foreign sources of oil, Bush and Cheney swiftly toppled Saddam Hussein but could not conclude a war they promised would be over in, “weeks not months.” Bush’s now iconic “Mission Accomplished” stands as the monument to the height of neoconservative folly.
In 2004, it is clear that seriously misguided Republican political operatives rigged another presidential election. Using evangelical computer geeks and unsophisticated propaganda, Karl Rove manufactured a narrow win that barely maintained the neoconservative grasp on power. The denouement led to the Democratic surge of 2006 that triggered the rise of a new progressive movement that eventually coalesced behind the candidacy of Barack Obama.
With forty years of political history behind us, Rev. Pulley and I walked onto an athletic field by the side of Junior Johnson, the NASCAR icon from North Carolina who endorsed Obama the week before the election. “I am the only Democrat in NASCAR,” Johnson informed us, “all the others are Republicans.”
Ensconced in the VIP area at the front of the platform, we waited for hours through two rain-showers that soaked us to the skin to see Obama on the final night of his personal odyssey that led him to this remote athletic field at UNCC, North Carolina’s sprawling urban university that has grown volcanically since 1968. Like a scene out of an epic film from the 1950s the massive audience spanned outward in a circle of humanity that was very different from the lily white audiences of the Humphrey campaign. Nixon’s legacy to the Republican Party was his Southern Strategy, but it had finally backfired and produced a counter-strategy, the political activation of a progressive coalition of minorities: African-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, Middle-Eastern Americans, Asian-Americans, Native-Americans as well as a huge number of white American progressives.
The autumnal rain left a fine mist hovering in the night air that produced a phantasmagoric atmosphere for Obama’s speech. After learning that Obama’s grandmother had died earlier in the day and the rally might be cancelled we waited in hope on the soggy ground surrounding the platform. After several hours punctuated by a reassuring appearance by Kay Hagan who would be elected to the Senate, we watched in the glowering darkness as Obama finally strode onto the platform waving to the throng of 25,000 who had patiently endured the elements to support the progressive juggernaut driving him towards victory over neoconservatism and its noxious allies.
Obama opened his remarks with a moving expression of his personal loss, describing his feelings at the crest of his campaign as “bittersweet” with his confident ebullience tempered by deep remorse at the loss of his grandmother. From those personal words that endowed his appearance with a poignant quality, Obama launched into his now well known litany recalling the appalling record of the Bush government and the urgent need for immediate change.
 Obama called on every member of the audience to sally forth and rally the people of North Carolina unto his cause. With the throng cheering, Obama blessed them and departed the platform to shake hands. As fate would have it, I was one of the last people who shook his hand while promising to do everything in my power to turn North Carolina blue once again.
That evening Rev. Pulley and I met our fellow Obama supporter, Vinod Thomas, for dinner in Charlotte at The Philosophers Stone. We recalled the pivotal role of John Brown in ending slavery in America while we talked until midnight about the work ahead of us on Election Day. That midnight, I drove back to Chapel Hill over deserted roads listening to a ghostly radio station that played classic rock from the Carter Era.
It had been thirty-two long and eventful years since the Old North State voted for a Democrat for President. Jimmy Carter won North Carolina in 1976 but lost the state in 1980. Mondale, Dukakis, Clinton, Gore and Kerry lost North Carolina to the red tide that swept America into the Reaganite vortex and the grand follies of neoconservative ideology.
Riveted to the television screen on election night, I watched in numb satisfaction as Obama made his victory statement. While Obama’s electoral victory was decisive, North Carolina became the last state to report its results three nerve-wracking days after the vote. By the narrowest of margins, a mere 11,000 votes out of four million, North Carolina returned to the blue progressive column where it belongs.
In 1960, North Carolina’s Terry Sanford was hailed for his innovative policies in education as the most progressive governor in America. At the Los Angeles convention, Sanford made the first nominating speech for JFK. Sanford and his supporters led by Bert Bennett and Charlie Smith constituted the pragmatic political core of progressive idealism in the South. During the Watergate Era, Sam J. Ervin, Jr. became a progressive icon who defined American patriotism as dedication to the ideals enshrined in the Constitution rather than blind allegiance to a Commander-in-Chief and empty devotion to a flag. North Carolina’s Rufus Edmisten and Jim Hunt established progressive policies that were trampled by Reaganites, but not forgotten. Today, North Carolina stands as the Southern outpost of Obama’s blue tide. For only the second time in forty years, North Carolina voted for a Democratic candidate for president who is undeniably African-American in a political gesture that demolishes the Southern Strategy of Nixon and all the Republican candidates since his star-crossed fall from power. Now President-Elect Obama is facing many challenges, but the core of his message is his promise to transform America by launching a period of progressive reform to deliver a more genuinely democratic and egalitarian society.
While Monday at UNCC and Tuesday on Election Day were completely overcast, rainy and dank, Wednesday dawned clear and bright. The days of rain ignited a brilliant palette of autumnal radiance that displayed the total spectrum of botanical color from red to orange to gold to yellow to green to purple all set against the concavity of the Carolina blue sky that opened into an emptiness that leads upward beyond the clouds and outward toward the moon, the planets, the stars and the infinite horizons of time.
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