Evaluating What New Hampshire Means for Barack Obama

This is new. America has never seen anything like the Obama phenomenon. …There is no longer any doubt that the Obama phenomenon is real. Mr. Obama’s message of hope, healing and change, discounted as fanciful and naïve by skeptics, drew Iowans into the frigid night air by the tens of thousands on Thursday to stand with a man who is not just running for president, but trying to build a new type of political movement. By midnight, Joe Biden and Chris Dodd had been chased from the race; John Edwards was all but literally on his knees; and the Clintons were trying, for the umpteenth time, to figure out how to remake themselves as the comeback kids. Shake hands with tomorrow. It’s here. Senator Obama’s victory speech was a concise oratorical gem. No candidate in either party can move an audience like he can. He characterized his stunning victory as an affirmation of “the most American of ideas—that in the face of impossible odds, people who love this country can change it.” Mr. Obama has shown…a capacity to make people feel good about their country again.

Namely, Jesse Jackson’s campaign-quests in 1984 and 1988 for the Democratic Party presidential nomination. While in that Reaganite Era the Republican Party’s patently Negro-phobic anti-civil rights movement skewed political appeal skillfully hamstrung and marginalized liberal political possibilities, it was not the American labor movement or other liberal avenues like the women’s movement that kept the “hope of liberal or progressive possibilities” from dying completely.

There’s no doubt that Obama’s current 2008 quest for the Democratic presidential nomination is a unique electoral phenomenon, paving a way to new political possibilities in our country’s oligarchic and plutocratic politics. But Jesse Jackson’s 1984 and 1988 campaign-quests also represented a unique Black American-connected electoral thrust, though at a lower level of systemic political impact than Obama’s campaign. Above all, Jackson’s campaign-quests—beyond any previous electoral undertaking by Black political personalities—afforded African-Americans a preliminary sense that their ethnic-bloc political culture and its leadership personalities contained attributes of national-level political capability. The African-American political scientist Melissa Harris-Lacewell at Princeton University has formulated this point by underlining what she calls “the explosive popularity of Jesse Jackson during his mid-1980s presidential bids.”