THE MOUNTAINEER

Edison L. Baddal
A view to a win (2)

BONTOC, Mountain Province -- Obama served as hope to the youth, the most economically active and productive group. His economic program and priorities successfully generated an optimistic and confident outlook for their economic future.

Looking back, Franklin Delano Roosevelt won a landslide victory during the 1931 US presidential elections due to his practical and economically vibrant programs. Fifty years later, Ronald Reagan also won by a landslide on the heels of the 1980-1981 economic downturn caused by Carter’s failed economic policies.

Another factor to his victory is his being a biracial man. A product of a white American mother and a black Kenyan father, he is both a white man and a black man although the black pigments prevailed in his skin color thus he is blacker than white. Even so, he is not totally black unlike his tribemates in native Africa and other blacks in the USA whose strains have never been infected with white strains and hence are utterly black.

His deep-brown complexion may have helped divert the attention of people to his skin color. Besides,aware that he is the product of both white and black races, whites are identified with him even as blacks are more so. This must be the reason why Obama was able to get 43% of the white votes to Mccain’s 55%.

Nonetheless, this advantage of Mccain was largely compensated by a wide margin as Obama clinched 96% of the black votes. Incidentally, McCain got most of his white votes from the deep South which used to be the hotbed of racism that gave rise to the civil rights movement.

Meanwhile, Obama’s deep-brown skin color contrasted with the blacker complexion of Rev. Jesse Jackson who ran as president in both the 1984 and 1988 presidential elections but was rebuffed on both instances. In the 1988 presidential derby, though, he was the first runner-up to Michael Dukakis in the race for the democratic nomination.

At that time, segregationist policies were making a strong comeback as Reagan reinforced racial equality even as he failed to enforce laws on affirmative actions. Americans then were fearful of a massive influx of black faces in the cabinet. Jesse

Jackson was among the frontrunners during the heady days of civil rights movement in the 1960’s led by Martin Luther King,Jr. Thus, his crocodile tears and affecting stance following Obama’s landslide victory are no less tears of joy and expression of inexpressible triumph for the civil rights movement as Obama overwhelmingly succeeded where he failed twice.

Lastly, he is credited with an awesome organizational skills as he was able to mobilize thousands of volunteers who kept his campaign awash with liquid cash both at the height of his races for the democratic nomination and for the presidency. It is said that his volunteers were able to solicit $600 million to bankroll his presidential campaign.

This spanking organizational skills enabled him to overcome Hillary Clinton’s almost insurmountable lead during the initial months of the primary elections for the democratic nomination. It also enabled him to sustain his pre-poll survey lead over McCain in the run-up to the presidential election.

Black power is now a reality in America even as it began to manifest in thw world before Obama’s win. Black power began to stir worldwide when Kofi Annan from the African continent led the United Nations for two terms from the late ‘90s and into the current decade of the twentieth century.

This energetic stirring of black power in America is the fruition of the dismantling of many segregationist state and federal policies and laws as a result of the massive, but non-violent, civil rights movement that started in the mid-50’s and spilled into the decade of the sixties. Obama as the first elected black president of the USA is the culmination of said movement that claimed the lives and made martyrs out of leaders like Malcolm X, Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King, Jr.

It is also the culmination, a century and a half later, of the thousands of lives that were wasted in the fratricidal American civil war from 1861-1864 on the issue of slavery. President Abraham Lincoln died as a martyr for the abolition of slavery and a century later, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated allegedly due in part to his sympathy to the civil rights movement.

Hence, Obama’s victory is the greatest affirmative action that the whites did for the black Americans. As the civil rightists in the 1960’s used the battlecry “We shall overcome” against the malevolent evils of racism, racial inequality and segregation, this time the blacks are shouting jubilantly in every corner of the USA with the resounding triumphant cry “Yes, we did.”

If anything, it is a concretization of Martin Luther’s aspiration in his “I have a dream” speech where he fervently wished that a time will come in Mississippi and elsewhere in racist states of America when a black man and a white man will sit face to face in one table sharing a meal together in the spirit of brotherhood, camaraderie and equality. That time is now.