In the 1850s, as Abraham Lincoln steadily moved toward an anti-slavery position that would come to define much of his legacy, he developed a theory of the Declaration of Independence that would become a guiding principle.

Lincoln became increasingly troubled by the spread of slavery into what were then new western territories of a growing nation. He saw this development as a threat to basic American principles where men and women ought to enjoy the fruits of their labors. Slavery, Lincoln believed, robbed many Americans of their basic liberties and freedoms and allowed “some people to eat while others did all the work,” wrote James Oakes, a Lincoln biographer.

Oakes writes in his book about Lincoln, “The Radical and the Republican,” that Lincoln developed his own interpretation of American history to buttress his point about slavery. It began with the Declaration of Independence. The country’s founders, Lincoln believed, “did not intend to declare all men equal in all respects,” Oakes notes.

In words that still ring true today and I believe apply to the 2008 presidential race, Oakes writes that Lincoln believed that the Declaration “set a standard maxim for a free society” that should be “constantly looked to, constantly labored for, even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading…to people of all colors.”

In other words, a perfect union would never quite be perfect, but what America has attained and can still achieve is worth the fight while appreciating what has been gained.

In 2008, Americans have been witnessed to something that would have been unimaginable to generations past - and one need not go into the distant past to comprehend the utter unlikelihood that an African-American man now stands on the cusp of being the Democratic Party’s nominee for president.

We have seen that while America is far from being a perfect union - and its racial divides continue to trouble the nation - it has nonetheless made the candidacy of Barack Obama not only possible, but a very successful venture. For even if Obama goes on to lose the general election, he has already won in many respects, and more importantly, the nation has gained a victory as well.

There will be more Barack Obamas in America’s political future, but there had to be a first, and the face of this particular pioneer is one born from a father of Kenya and a mother of Kansas, raised by white grandparents, and who left the Hawaiian islands, where he came of age, to come to the mainland and eventually make his significant mark on American history.

For those of us old enough to go through presidents like Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Clinton and the Bushes, it is quite incredible to grasp that an exotic politician named Barack Obama will soon be the presidential nominee of one of America’s two major politicial parties. For the kids of today who are in a tizzy about Obama, getting on the Internet and connecting to their social networks in talking about their candidate, it may be no big deal.

But then they don’t have that personal perspective of recalling a presidential candidate like George Wallace, who ran as an independent in 1968 to represent the resentment of white Southerners to the civil rights movement of that era, and to push back against even the modest gains of African-Americans of those times. To the Wallace voters of 1968, a Barack Obama is something they could not have even conceived or remotely accepted - a black-looking man who is the son of a biracial marriage, and who has the audacity to believe he can be president.

It’s still a long road to November victory for Obama. And given the fact that we live in a great but still imperfect nation, the first African-American candidate with a serious chance of being elected president of the United States is sure to face a slew of racial resentments and stereotypes - both real and imagined.

Still, for Obama just to get to this point, proves we’re long past the days of George Wallace and the segregationists and the institutionalized racism so long ingrained into American life and society. The Declaration of Independence and its ideals , as Lincoln rightly said, are to be “constantly labored for, even though never perfectly attained.” The 2008 presidential campaign has already been a long tussle, but given its results thus far, worth laboring for in our grand but imperfect union.

Joaquin C. Tijerina, Official Chisme Blogger y Columnista

   

This entry was posted on Friday, May 9th, 2008 at 1:42 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.