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A high school history class kindled my interest in primary sources. For an assigned paper, I read Alexis de Toqueville's

(A lot of other people read it in school as well -- search Alexis de Toqueville in Google News and you'll see all sorts of quotes appropriated from him for election stories and letters.)

So I was interested to find, in this account of Obama's election in the Irish Times by journalist and novelist Colm Tóibín from New York, another European's attempt to characterize a later America through the lens of this watershed moment.

Sprinkled among paragraphs of anecdotes, hard-news details, statistics and political analysis is a very short and most interesting essay on the vision of America. Here it is:

How Obama captured our hearts

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, views its role in the terms John Winthrop set for it in 1630 before his ship landed in the new world, and which John Kennedy quoted in 1961: "that we shall be as a city upon a hill - the eyes of all people are upon us.

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But his success can maybe also be explained by the idea that the US, without anybody noticing too much, has grown out of old racism and old prejudice, that it has changed fundamentally since the 1960s, even though it often seemed, under the Republicans, to be reverting to some former self. It is possible that the US Obama was speaking to has become the real US, and it is more open, more tolerant, less divided and sectarian than it often gave itself credit for. It is also frightened by failed foreign policies, by the spectre of unemployment and economic depression.

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What worked in his message has, to a large extent, been lost on the Republicans, who ran this campaign as though the only part of the country worth reaching was rural, small-town and white. Despite the fact that John McCain had fought bravely (more bravely than Obama) for the rights of the 14 million people who live and work illegally in the US, despite the fact that he is a man of intelligence, openness and considerable wit and humanity, he seemed during this campaign to be living in a world not only before the internet but before the women's movement and the civil-rights movement, before the calming of the US.

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In a country that has a reputation for not being much interested in the past, the history of slavery, the history of the Civil War and the history of the Great Depression entered the debate with an urgency as fierce as the urgency of now. Last Tuesday, something that has its roots in the worst moments of US history was healed and came home pure.

It's a nice Sunday read.

Inside politics: Battle Plans: How Obama won. In The New Yorker, chief political correspondent Ryan Lizza does the strategy analysis.

For Obama aides, who viewed McCain as the one Republican with the potential to steal the anti-Washington bona fides of their candidate, (Joel) Benenson's polling was revelatory. "Voters actually did not know as much as I think the press corps thought they did about John McCain," Anita Dunn, a senior adviser to Obama, told me. "What they'd heard about McCain most recently, and certainly during the primary process, was that he was like every other Republican--fighting to sound more like George Bush." Benenson said, "What we knew at the start of the campaign was that the notion of John McCain as a change agent and independent voice didn't exist anywhere outside the Beltway."

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One day in September, Plouffe asked Messina if he could find seven million dollars more in the budget--for a thirty-minute advertorial that was to air on the Wednesday before Election Day. He found it. (The Obama commercial attracted an estimated thirty-three million viewers, nearly twice the number for the top-rated "Dancing with the Stars.") There was still money left over, so the campaign bought ads in video games, like Guitar Hero and Madden NFL 09, and scheduled some get-out-the-vote concerts aimed at the youth vote and featuring the rapper Jay-Z and the N.B.A. star LeBron James. "I mean, dude," Messina said, "when you're buying commercials in video games, you truly are being well funded."

Long and detailed, its another good read.

Later: This sentence, a thinking point of Obama's primary campaign, keeps tugging at me:

"How do we talk about change in a way that makes Hillary Clinton pay a price for her experience?"

Used later against McCain, as well, the concept also seems to open a window on Sarah Palin. (Lizza doesn't address the vice-presidential picks at all in this piece.) I want to think about this some more.

 Tags  election Obama

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