CNN is holding a panel right now, a little postmortem on this campaign season and the parallels between now and 1968. David Gergen was one of several on the panel who pointed out that a major part of Obama’s success this year has to do with a youth movement similar to the one Bobby Kennedy tapped into all those years ago. He talked about how the youth of America are being drawn in and are unhappy with politics as usual in America. Which I felt was right on (I have a crush on Gergen by the way because he always seems to articulate what it is I’m thinking of and assume he was better looking in his youth). Anyway, the guy sitting to his left interrupted him and said, “But I’m confused about what they WANT? I mean, what are these people looking for that show up to an Obama rally???”
I wasn’t happy with any of the 40+ year olds answers to that question on the panel so here’s an approximate list of the way I, 28 year old white girl, views my country. I'm going to speak for every single person ever so .
1. It’s hard to tell the difference between the two parties anymore in terms of the deep rooted hold special interests and lobbyists have on both groups. The fact that, to a certain degree, Obama spoke out about that, was extremely powerful.
2. We know first hand how shitty our school system is…and we also know how expensive it’s getting to go to college. And we know that African-Americans suffer at the hands of this system more than anyone of us and we think fixing this is key to making our country better.
3. We really want to help…get down and help, not sign-up for more credit cards and buy stuff like iPods (fine, maybe we want our iPods but we want to help too!). No one took that desire sleeping within us to serve our country if someone would just lead the way seriously except Obama.
4. While the baby boomers were talking about the similarities between Iraq and Vietnam and hawks squawked about the inherent evil that characterized our “enemies” after 9-11, we scratched our heads and thought they were all full of shit. We’ve grown-up playing tic-tac-toe on the Internet against a kid living in the United Arab Emirates. We’ve grown up watching movies and reading books and understand that in this age of global interconnectedness it doesn’t take a brain surgeon to realize someone doesn’t just wake-up and decide to do evil. No, we know that it’s about arms dealings …. Money trading hands….long power struggles…..oil……someone else similar in age to us living in a place that offers him no hope....all that. We needed someone to speak our language, someone who could describe how complicated and nuanced the world was without sounding like he has a stick up his ass. Obama did that.
5. We wanted someone who could rise above the same political game that has been playing out our entire lifetime. Even when Bill Clinton was in office, the Republicans were setting the terms of the debate: pandering to our worst fears and empowering the voters that lurk in the darkest corners of bigotry and misogyny in this country. They called the Democrats wimpy latte drinkers and the Dems scrambled to say, “nuh uh!”. Obama came along and laid out some new ground rules. He made it clear we wouldn’t be dragged down some inane conversation about good and evil nor would he be proving to anyone how much Jesus matters to him. He took a chance on our better nature, as a whole country, and we responded.
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