Tremors of a new age

comment On Nov 4 at around 8 am, I stood in line with a few hundred people in a small neighbourhood school across from my house. In front of me was a young black man who had never voted before.

For the next three hours, as we inched along in multiple S-lines toward the polling booths and tables set up to accommodate the crowd, he called just about everyone in his address book, ordering them to go out and vote.

Behind me was a hairdresser who came with three generations of her entire extended family. Just up ahead was a father with his two young children - too young to vote, but not too young to understand why their father and they were there.

People who stand in long lines with a lesser sense of purpose do not sing, they do not bring cookies to share with total strangers, but this crowd did. They laughed. They met neighbours they never knew they had. They knew why they were there and the air was electric.

A little more than 12 hours later, the world saw the result of all those long lines, 66 million deep. Few TV cameras could turn away from Jesse Jackson - the last African-American presidential candidate - in Grant Park in Chicago, an American flag in one hand and tears rolling down his face.

Just about every news network showed an outsized map of America, looking a little bluer coast to coast as the hours went by. Name the city and the town, and crowds had packed every communal space, delirious with anticipation as the results began rolling in and everyone suddenly understood once again how the Electoral College works.

Reporters spoke of how the mass of people who packed downtown New York City had roared so loudly at around 11pm that the mighty skyscrapers surrounding them shook as though in an earthquake, the tremors of a new age.

They were all there for the extraordinary young senator with his Kenyan roots, his middle-American pedigree, his childhood in Indonesia and Hawaii, his polyglot family, and his true belief in the power of each person to make a change.

He often used the oratorical device of preceding his eloquent arguments with two simple words for his gathered audience: “New Hampshire." "Two days." "Go vote."

On Nov 4, 66 million people gave two words back to him: President Obama.

Echoes of Kennedy

For democracies around the world, including Malaysia, Barack Obama is an object lesson in leadership. We do not yet know what his presidency will bring once he is inaugurated on Jan 20, 2009.

We do not yet know how he will resolve two disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the latter born of 9/11, the former rooted in lies. We cannot yet see how he will hoist the free-falling global economy out of the abyss, a catastrophe that is destroying so many lives in America and abroad because of the obscene mismanagement of the Bush administration and their perverse faith in an unfettered free market.

We do not yet know whether a President Obama will close down Guantanamo, open new dialogue with nations senselessly ostracised by George W Bush and Dick Cheney.

Our fingers are crossed, but we do know a few things.

Obama - this bi-racial, multinational young man who preferred public service to the lawyerly lucre of Wall Street, who had rhetorical skills that rivaled Lincoln and Kennedy but who barely had a record - planted a flag in Illinois 21 months ago and got an entire nation to follow.

He overcame a racial barrier in a nation that 50 years ago, would have sent him to the back of the bus, but which today elected him president and made him the leader of the free world. Obama is living proof that the American democracy has awakened from its long nightmare, that hope trumps fear, that race is no obstacle to the highest office in the land.

On a night when he defeated an aging warrior once known for his ‘Straight Talk Express’, Obama was the one who offered unvarnished reality.

America is fighting two wars that are bankrupting the nation and killing our young. The world is in the worst economic meltdown in 100 years. We may not solve all these problems in a year or even four.

Instead of empty promises, Obama called on the tens of millions of people directly in front of him in Chicago and in front of TV sets in 50 states to do something the nation hasn't heard so explicitly since John F Kennedy's inaugural speech in 1961: Get to work. Give back. Stand together. The nation needs every one of you.

For Malaysia, Obama's slogan, "Yes we can," echoes the affirmative "Malaysia boleh."

As both the US and Malaysia prepare for a new era that will hopefully get our two nations back on track, these two near-identical slogans remind us that the me-first, business-as-usual days have been thoroughly discredited.

We have entered an age of public service and, yes, community organising.

It takes real leadership to plant a flag in the ground, and then ask the people to walk through the brambles with you.

As Obama has indicated at every turn, and which every leader in every nation facing today's turmoil must understand, the road will be hard, but it is the only road and it is one we must take together.

For all of us, Obama is a lesson in leadership, the unambiguous face of democracy.

AZLAN IBRAHIM is a US-based political communications consultant who has worked with the Democratic Party, the Obama 2008 campaign, the Michigan Legislature numerous political and corporate campaigns in the US. He went to the Malay College Kuala Kangsar and currently lives in Michigan.