November 6, 2008 in Opinion

Our View: Barack Obama’s victory was based on merit

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As President-elect Barack Obama calmly took to the lectern on the raised stage at Chicago’s Grant Park, he looked like a man who had done this sort of thing before.

Was he an incumbent president getting to greet the masses after sailing to victory? A camera sweeping the audience told another story. A delirious, diverse throng was rejoicing in one of the most momentous occasions in this nation’s history.

Forty years after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and 43 years after the Voting Rights Act was adopted, hundreds of thousands of people gathered in the same park that bore witness to Mayor Richard Daley’s security thugs pummeling war protesters outside the 1968 Democratic Convention.

But this time there was no tear gas or baton strikes or bloodied faces. This time a united crowd had gathered to see another obscure, inexperienced Illinois politician make history. The first one, Abraham Lincoln, sought to bind up the nation’s wounds, in part, by emancipating the slaves. The man on stage was the first African-American to be elected president. And because he never made race an issue, it was sometimes easy to forget that Obama was finishing an unprecedented journey.

He is black. He will be the next president. That says a lot about a country that has been tormented by the issue of race since its founding.

Americans have long had to concede their country’s moral failing when lectured by foreign leaders about the treatment of minorities and the legacy of slavery. Now we can proudly claim that we’ve elected a black citizen to the highest office in the land. That’s something that doesn’t happen in France, Great Britain and the rest of Europe.

Sen. John McCain deserves credit for not pandering to the racist instincts of some voters and for magnanimously paying tribute to a historic event made possible by his defeat. We’ve come a long way since poll taxes, violent voter suppression and the Southern Strategy.

Though we disagree with Obama on some issues and question his experience level, it is clear that his victory was based on merit. He never played the victim, probably because he was far too busy assembling one of the best-organized and hardest-working campaigns in election history. As McCain said, the two candidates had an extended argument about the best way to lead the country.

So while we tout a black man as the leader of the free world, an even prouder achievement is that skin color was never the point.

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