The change election

However you feel about Barack Obama's election to the presidency on Tuesday, it has answered one question that has been in the back of voter's minds, both supporters and opponents, ever since Obama's emergence onto the national scene 21 months ago--can a majority of Americans really be persuaded to pull the lever to elect an African American to the highest office in the land. Our dismal history of race relations has led many--left, right and middle, as well as black, brown and white--to doubt it. Many thought that we might first see a black president only if a black vice-president came to office through the death of a white president. Many more thought even that scenario unlikely.

This has been (famously) an election about change, change in the future direction of the country. But the results, in my opinion, speak to the change that has already occurred, so gradually over the last decades as to pass unremarked, and so subtly as to defy definition. We have not, of course, been beamed into some kind of post-racial utopia since Tuesday. But we can now point to some evidence for the hopes we harbor--that we can put a pernicious national shame behind us--that a more perfect union is a practical possibility, not just a line in the patriotic catechism. That's what I call change.