The Tipping Point
There is history within the history being made today
2008-06-03
Eric Easter

“And you may ask yourself, how did I get here?..”
 Talking Heads. Once in A Lifetime.

7:58pm. CST. – Barack Obama is announced by MSNBC as the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party.

For the next several weeks, people unhappy with or unsettled by the outcome of the primary process will complain about delegates and superdelegates. There will be calls for a change in systems and there will be accusations of wrangling, trickery and wrongdoing.

Those people will be wrong. In the end, the superdelegates were the best thing to happen to this campaign and for one specific reason, it’s the best reasoning to accept Barack Obama as the best choice for president.

That a strategic and demographically mixed majority of Democratic voters has made Barack Obama their preference is most certainly historic and significant, and something which we as a country should celebrate.

But most people have it all wrong about what their role was in this primary. The primaries are about choosing who runs the party, not who will lead the people. In the end, it’s the super structure of the Democratic Party that gets to make that determination.

And not to downgrade the importance of the electorate, but the truly significant point of history this day is that a core group representing the most powerful Democratic interests in this country sent a Black candidate over the top and made the decision that he should carry the party’s agenda forward.

These are people who, quite frankly, stand the most to gain from a Democratic victory – choice government jobs, millions of dollars in federal contracts, lobbying deals, the spoils of influence. While there may have been bits of the emotion and passion about that the normal voter has about specific candidates, the passion line stops where the bank line begins.  And while the promise of a new racial tone in America may have been an incentive for some, people with their careers at stake could have waited a while longer for that eventuality.

But they did not. They made a strategic, dispassionate, coldly mathematical calculation that took into account their personal vested interests as well as those of the party, and still the sum of that algebra came totaled as Obama.

That is a major and dramatic turn of events and signal of the most radical change in America. That millions of young people in the U.S. have reached a point of color-blindness is a given if one is observant. That white people in the suburbs were ready to be done with accusations of racism was also evident in one has been listening.  But that the people in the smoky backrooms of American power, the steakhouses where backs are slapped, the K Street offices where deals are cut and the mini-mansions where checks are written have chosen this candidate at this time is the most telling sign that the change we have sought for these many years is not just imminent but in fact here – now.

It is a testament to the extraordinary leadership of Barack Obama and the organization he put forth, and it is a tribute to a country that even at its worst has always actively worked to be better.

Damn the electoral system if you will, but when you explain this moment to your children at bedtime and speak of the 45 years since “I Have a Dream” and the 40 years since Dr. King’s death and the 54 years since Brown and the 200 years since the end of the slave trade, find some room for Alexis Herman and Donna Brazile and the hundreds of people whose names we may never know who go by the name of superdelegates.  They have laid the cornerstone for a new beginning.

But, it’s only the beginning.

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