By Richard Cohen
Tuesday, November 4, 2008; Page A17
If the polls are right, if it don't rain and the creek don't rise, the winner of the presidential election is sure to be . . . Lyndon Baines Johnson. When he signed the epochal Civil Rights Act of 1964, Johnson knew he was also signing away the South and, with it, much of the white vote elsewhere as well. "We have lost the South for a generation," he supposedly said back then. For that generation, time's up.
Barack Obama is often called a transformational figure, and this election, it then follows, is a transformational one. I beg to quibble. Barack Obama is a confirmational figure, and this election confirms what has been gradually occurring in American society ever since that July day when Johnson virtually outlawed most forms of racial segregation in America. We've been transforming ever since.
My colleague David Broder dates to Dec. 8, 2007, the moment he knew "this presidential campaign was going to be the best" he'd ever covered. That was when about 18,000 people crammed into Hy-Vee Hall in Des Moines to see Obama and Oprah Winfrey, and you knew, if you were there -- and I was -- that something momentous was happening. There, on the stage, were Obama, his wife, Michelle, and Winfrey. I turned to my friend Joe Klein of Time magazine and said we were immeasurably lucky. We were witnessing history being made.
There, you see, was an immense throng of white people, with an occasional nonwhite face, sometimes Asian or Hispanic. It was a fairly young crowd, and no matter what their age or their race or their sex, they were drawn to this event by two black people -- Obama and Winfrey -- and it was hard to tell then who mattered more. At least in that place and at that time, the post-racial society had arrived.
I am not naive. Pockets of racism exist, and depending on the issue -- crime, for instance -- they can swell. But the country has changed. It has done so because of personalities, policies and actions that at the time might have been questionable. The civil rights acts of the Johnson era compelled whites to eat with blacks in the same restaurants and to share the same motels and hotels. Affirmative action accustomed whites to seeing blacks in positions from which they had, by custom or by law, been excluded. Blacks and whites could, in fact, work together. The racists were wrong.
continued at link:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/03/AR2008110302609.htmlLBJ, RIP.
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