G.E. “Skip” Lawrence
glawrence@phoenixvillenews.com

Tuesday in America, a General Election changed many features of the face of the nation’s politics, and all at once. Just how much was reflected in the commentaries appearing Wednesday.

The claims — and there are many of them — would have seemed extravagant were they not all apparently true. Dumbfoundingly true, even though we’ve lived with possibility of them for two full years now.

“One of the most dramatic power shifts in American political history,” wrote Ron Elving for National Public Radio. Wrote E.J. Dionne, no fan of hyperbole, in The Washington Post, “a definitive end to a conservative era.”

“A national catharsis,” wrote Adam Nagourney in The New York Times. Then he got to his real point: “It was just as much a strikingly symbolic moment in the evolution of the nation’s fraught racial history,” as Sen. Obama swept away “the last racial barrier in American politics with ease as the country chose him as its first black chief executive.”

Those assessments all marched forward, ever forward, in the way that yesterday marches into today.

But the farther from Washington you listened Wednesday, the more the claims were based on heftier looks backwards, and the assessments more cognizant of not how much but how deeply American politics had changed.

Gerard Baker wrote in The London Times, “yesterday’s results were head-spinning stuff,” a demonstration of Americans’ “unique capacity for self-renewal.”

Others, more daring, used language usually reserved for churchly matters, and used it freely. (Baker’s “self-renewal” is, after all, only a stripped-down version of the word, heavily freighted in the American public lexicon but little used of late, “redemption” — in the same sense that the “self-improvement” aisle at the bookstore is just the southside shelf of the north-facing “theology”).

In Europe, “redemption” was common currency. Jonathan Freeland made the transition neatly, for The Guardian. “America has not lost its talent for renewal — even redemption,” he wrote. “Americans realized they faced grave problems and needed to rise above the petty, cultural warfare of the past.”

Freeland enumerated reasons like a kid in a candy shop. “The US can now claim to be a leader not a laggard in the business of overcoming racial prejudice…. The election itself revealed America to be among the most politically engaged nations on earth….more than a defeat for a political party, a demographic shift.”

But he was also careful about the qualifiers. “Of course, it has not and could not absolve in a single night the original sin of slavery and two centuries of racism; that stain is there forever. And of course structural inequalities remain: a US government analysis projects that one in three of African-American boys born in 2001 will spend some time in prison during their lives.”

(Domestic commentators should read that. George Will should read that. Will wrote this yesterday in his syndicated column: “[T]he election of Barack Obama is an American majority’s self-emancipation: We are free at last from the inexpressible tedium of the preoccupation with skin pigmentation.” Really? OK, George, you go tell that to the one in three.)

Freeland was good. But by far the best commentator I’ve yet seen is Colm Tóibín, writing for The Irish Times.

Tóibín has no illusions about the contradictory facts of American political life. “How African-Americans live in the US cannot be merely explained by the sad legacy of history. There is a sense of hard prejudice and neglectful, or indeed deliberate, public policy in the great difference between how whites and African-Americans live....

“While 11 per cent of white children in the US live in poverty, almost 40 per cent of African-American children do…. More than a quarter of all African-American males are likely to enter prison in their lifetime; the figure for white males is 5.5 per cent. The infant mortality rate for African-American babies is twice that for white babies.”

(George: please add Tóibín to your reading list, as well.)

But he’s also aware of the deeper streams of meaning in America’s politics, and how those streams influence how voters saw and heard the events of the campaign. “God is never far away in the US. The urge for material well-being is bound up in strange ways with the possibility of transcendence. The US, as it strives for perfection, sees itself as specially chosen,” Tóibín wrote.

When it seemed that after 2000 and 2004 Democrats could no longer count on winning by offering “better policies and more rational argument,” Tóibín asked someone “if there was any senior figure on the Democrat side who had made his way into politics via one of the churches. I was told, sadly, that the only such figures were African-Americans, and despite the fact that Robert Kennedy said in 1968 that 40 years from then ‘a Negro could be president’, it still seemed an impossible idea.”

Tóibín got the fundamental sense of it right: “The election of Barack Obama has healed something that has its roots in the worst moments of US history,” he wrote, “and bears the hallmarks of a country living up to its own ideals.”

How we see ourselves is one thing. How others see us may differ. How a friend sees us — well, a friend may see us better than we do ourselves.

Our friends at The Irish Times got us right, in the same fashion as Tocqueville — the first of our European friends to tell us some truths we couldn’t see with our own eyes: “The greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults.”

You can contact G.E. “Skip” Lawrence at glawrence@phoenixvillenews.com.