I was born in the spring of 1971. In the span of history that was certainly not a long time ago.
When you take into consideration it wasn’t until the 1971 college football season that the University of Alabama fielded its first integrated football team, you realize just how far the South, and even our country, has advanced when it comes to race relations.
As I attended a high school football game in the heart of Dixie last Friday night, I thought to myself how the only color that mattered to the players, coaches and fans at the stadium was the color of the jersey their respective team was wearing. I guess you could throw in the color of the field is important as well, but no one thinks about black and white players competing on the same team for the same school anymore. They don’t in Georgia, they don’t in Alabama and they don’t in Mississippi. At one time this certainly was not the case and, not all that long before I arrived on the scene.
With that in mind, it was a great thing our country elected its first black president last week. Regardless of where you stand on the political fence, you have to admit it was a big step for our country which until Nov. 4, 2008 had only elected white men as president. We lagged far behind other leading countries of the world who have had leaders of color and also females in power throughout their history. Last week’s election would have also been historical, it should be noted, had John McCain won because it would have meant our first female vice-president, something which also would have been welcomed in its own right.
The fact that Obama is our president-elect defies most political experts. I may not be considered the “political expert” some are, but politics is a passion of mine. I follow it closely. I’m one of the few who can tell you about all the candidates running in both the Democratic and Republican primaries. I know about the various third-party candidates. My television spends a good bit of time on the CSPAN networks.
Frankly, I never thought Obama had a chance. I would have put money on Hillary Clinton winning the Democratic nomination without much of a challenge. Obama was pretty much an unknown United States Senator with little experience and his name recognition was not high nationally. To be frank, the fact he is African-American was also a major obstacle he had to overcome.
Even once Obama won the Democratic nomination the battle ahead of him was still going to be long and tough. The conservative movement has a talk radio network which blasted him on a daily basis. National hosts like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Neal Boortz to even area radio hosts like Martha Zoeller, Herman Cain and Al Gainey, distorted the truth and even told outright falsehoods about Obama day in and day out right up until the Nov. 4 vote.
Don’t underestimate their power along with the power of the Republican-oriented FOX News channel who has biased talk show hosts, including the previously mentioned Hannity parading as “journalists.”
In the end, however, Americans saw through the distortions and decided it was time to make history. The voters decided it was time for a change. When all was said and done, it was a clear-cut victory, not like the ones in 2000 and 2004 where the victory was decided under the most suspicious of circumstances.
Chris Bridges is an editor with Mainstreet Newspapers. E-mail comments about this column to chris@mainstreetnews.com.
If you know so much about politics, ("I'm one of the few who can tell you about all the candidates..."), you might have found some other small reason why he might have been elected. If this is the extent of your knowledge about this candidate, you might want to stop blowing your own horn, because it's painfully obvious you don't know much.
And maybe you should stop spending so much time listening to FOX, and Rush, and Sean, and Neal, because it's clear from this editorial piece that they're having WAY too much influence over "your" opinions.