For now, though, with the first presidential debate of 2008 still echoing in my ears, I just want to savor the moment and throw out a few random thoughts while getting more substantial ones together.
Are you reading or have you read Barack Obama’s The Audacity of Hope? If so and if you're a Baby Boomer, Barack’s confession that he’d "always felt a curious relationship to the sixties" (p. 29) must have brought a smile to your face. It certainly made me, a person who entered high school in 1960, smile–not just smile, but actually grin. And sit up a little straighter. And read a little more attentively..
Timing is everything. Drama is better. Take McCain’s strategy (or, harking back to Friday night’s debate, was that a tactic?) of announcing earlier this week that he was suspending his campaign for the time being because the economic crisis took precedence over presidential politics and therefore he wouldn’t be debating Obama Friday night. Was it just coincidence that a new poll had been released a few hours earlier showing that Barack’s lead had not only rebounded from the Palin sensation but had also exceeded what it was before the Republican convention? Millions and millions would have been disappointed if America had not had the opportunity to see the debate, and I’m glad that Obama so gracefully stuck to his original plans. As George Stephanopoulos said on ABC Nightline’s post-debate assessment, Obama showed that "he belonged on that stage." Well, of course he did and does! And he belongs on the world stage as well. He is, for millions, the candidate of a lifetime.
As things stand now, every week between now and the election is bound to bring some new national crisis for America that would be cause for cancelling debates if there were that close a relationship between debating and the natural course of events. It was fitting for everyone to step down from campaigning immediately following this year’s natural disasters in the Gulf. In the case of the financial collapse, though, I remember saying to friends months ago–when gas prices started spiraling upwards, and people were being laid off from their jobs and thrown out of their homes whether they’d lived there one year or fifty, and college students began having trouble putting together financial aid packages–I remember saying how much the times felt like what the dawning of the Great Depression must have been like. So who didn’t see this week coming?
We Baby Boomers have lived through our own perilous economic times, so a good many of us probably felt, if you’ll forgive the mixed metaphor, the approaching chill of this current nightmare. That premonition doesn’t, of course, make it an awful lot easier to stomach. On television newscasts, the man and woman in the street, even–or maybe, especially–in the flooded streets of Galveston and Houston, cite faith in God or faith in the American spirit as what will bring us out of this morass. I think we do have to add those ingredients to our own efforts to recover and repair and recoup. But we also need the kind of leader Barack Obama has shown himself to be. His first four years will be as difficult as any president ever faced. We must all do what we can to help him help us.
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