The Hope Obama Brings

Alan Ferguson: Obama articulates the hopes and dreams of the new generation

Alan Ferguson, Special to The Province

Published: Tuesday, March 25, 2008

Whether or not Barack Obama becomes president of the United States, he has changed politics for good in his own country -- and no doubt in Canada as well.

Anyone who doubts this should go back and read the 5,000-word speech on race he delivered in Philadelphia on March 18. It is a speech of such searing honesty and stark truths that it should be a fixture in the study of politics for decades to come.

I don't say that lightly. In more than four decades of journalism, I've had to read the vapid utterances of presidents, prime ministers and politicians of all stripes.

This one is different. It breaks the mould.

This is not necessarily an endorsement of Obama's policies, nor have I fallen under the spell of his sparkling oratory. But it's why I suggest you read the speech. It's at theprovince.com/obamaspeech.

In it you will find his penetrating analysis of a nation whose founding document was "stained by [the] original sin of slavery," and whose racial history helps explain the "incendiary language" used by his own former religious mentor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright -- whose views, says Obama, "denigrate both the greatness and the goodness of our nation."

It might not have occurred to me, but a much younger friend suggested to me why this speech and others from the Democratic presidential candidate resonate so profoundly with young people.

These are people, he says, who have grown up immured in the false expectations of a material world that forever falls short of its extravagant promise. They have heard politicians lying to justify making war. They have been bombarded with ads making absurdly exaggerated claims about everything from sex medicines to fast cars.

They are exposed to "reality" TV shows whose connection with the real world they inhabit is non-existent.

The miracle is that their sensibilities have not been drowned in this foaming sea of fraudulent illusions. On the contrary, says my friend, the new generation is living proof of the regenerative powers of the human spirit.

Idealism, honesty, plain-speaking, fairness and decency are the well-spring of their new identity. And, in Obama, they believe they have found someone who articulates their hopes and dreams, who exposes the stale rhetoric of the Bush clique -- sinister practitioners of an arrogant politics of exclusion.

No less do they resent the assumption of the right to power as ruthlessly pursued by Hillary Clinton and the omnipresent Bill.

They respect the Republican candidate, the war hero John McCain. But he is the star in a fading video of a history that failed them.

To them, an Obama speech is like throwing open a window to a fresh breeze that scatters the cobwebs of disillusionment and despair.

Obama can make the young weep for an America that lost its way. He can fill them with joy for what it still could be.

He raises young American eyes to a new and different horizon.

© The Vancouver Province 2008