"Life of the party"

Eric Alterman:

It's amazing how quickly Barack Obama has gone from an unknown state senator to president-elect of the United States--

Five years ago, I was invited to a book party at Harry Evans and Tina Brown's East Side New York townhouse for former Bill Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal, at which Blumenthal let it be known that ex-President Clinton would be in attendance. Even though I had to give a talk about my own just-published book What Liberal Media? in Park Slope, Brooklyn that night, they had given me a town car, and I decided to stop by the party on my way and say hello for 15 minutes or so. I did, and left, and that's the end of my part of the story.

But I also brought a friend named Katie who was then a youngish freelance journalist, and I thought she could make some useful contacts. When I went to Brooklyn, I left Katie at the party, and I don't remember talking about it again with her. But years later, I heard from yet another friend, Ed Epstein, who met Katie at the party, that she had spent much of the night talking to a guest who had been brought by Clinton's friend Vernon Jordan. He was a young, black state senator from Illinois with big ears. And in all the commotion surrounding Clinton, he was pretty much left alone. Katie is a nice person, and so she ambled over so he wouldn't feel so left out of things. That was March 2003, and the journey from there to here is almost unfathomable, but there it is.

Two years later, in early 2005, I received an invitation to a small dinner in Washington with the same fellow, now a first-term senator from Illinois. I did not have any strong feelings about him before going. I hadn't watched his 2004 convention speech, and while I'd heard nothing but good things about him, I am pretty cynical about the gap between what politicians want you to think about them and what they really are. There's something about American politics - perhaps the constant need to raise money combined with the celebrity-mad media that covers them - that interferes with their ability to speak naturally and honestly with anyone but their closest friends and family.

Anyway, we were seated together, and while the dinner was off the record and so I can't report anything that was said, I can report that I was left in awe of the man's genuineness and lack of pretence, of his self-confidence, self-possession and natural intelligence, and his lack of embarrassment when it came to the inspirational aspects of the message he hoped to convey. What's more, he was not merely liberal, but self-confidently liberal at a moment when this species was becoming rarer and rarer in American national politics, so depressing was our interpretation of the results of the 2004 election.

I had to pinch myself after the dinner was over - well, metaphorically anyway - to keep myself from falling in love with the guy. He upended almost all of my preconceived notions about politicians, even the ones I liked and admired. Walking around Washington that night, I thought to myself, well, this country can't be hopeless if, post Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, that's the kind of black leadership we are producing. I wondered if maybe, someday - say, 20 years from now - he might have been able to make Americans sufficiently comfortable with his manner to run successfully for president. Yeah, 20 years felt about right.

Make no mistake, people. Barack Obama will disappoint all of us at some point in the future. That's because we live in an imperfect world with a far worse political system, one driven not merely by cynicism but also money, power and status that derives from all the worst qualities that popular people exploited in high school. But he is, I felt that night and continue to feel today, the absolute best and brightest our political system has produced since John and Robert Kennedy and perhaps since Franklin D Roosevelt. And need I add, both FDR and JFK were not merely white, but also incredibly rich, born to enormously influential and ambitious political families. Barack Obama did it all on his own.

Still, we've been around since 1789. It's been a long time coming, but thanks to the superlative, inventive and incredibly well self-disciplined presidential campaign run by Barack Obama and company, a change has finally come.

Barack Obama