The extraordinary fact about Obama is that his campaign is more like a movement than an ordinary American political campaign. It is like the Dean phenomenon of four years ago, but way, way surpassing it. There are a few reasons for this movement quality to the Obama phenomenon.
One is the extraordinary desire among a vast swath of Americans to be rid of things Bush. The disgust that should have put him out of office in 2004 has now infected almost every sphere of American voter except die-hard Republicans. This includes the determinative (since Reagan) group of swing voters, sometimes called Reagan Democrats, sometimes called the Bubba vote (when it went to Clinton).
Sadly, as ever, much of this is thin support--owing more to gasoline prices and housing market collapse than, for example, protest against the vast assault on constitutional government the Bush people represent. Even Iraq--there is Iraq fatigue, but the Bush people still command the debate on this one. This means, for example, there is absolutely no discussion of how Iraq has been destroyed--just the stupid abstractions about democracy, security and the like that drone on mindlessly forever. (For me, the inability of this country to face its crime in Iraq is unforgivable; it will never happen.) And it also means that people are still susceptible to being scared by the Republicans--the Democrats will be attacked for both leaving the "homeland" vulnerable by such things as not endorsing unchecked wiretapping and wanting to "surrender" in Iraq. This stuff is still potent and might still work for McCain. There are no guarantees a Democrat will win in November.
The Obama phenomenon is like a movement as well because of the profound generational shift it involves. People are throwing around the term "post-racial" to describe the politics and attitudes of the generation that started in college, say, between 1980 and 1990 and has continued beyond. It is a generation coming of age with Reagan and his successors in power. In some sense it was the seed of the Right's internal contradiction, which was they could stop the political revolution of the left, but not the cultural revolution; this paralleled how the new left had created its own backlash--the silent majority, the moral majority, which then became the dominant political power for a generation. (Aah, what a joy to sink into dialectical explanation again, if only for a moment...)
There is something to this post-racial idea. It is the product of kids' actual experience of growing up in a far less segregated world than our generation in America did. And it is reflected in public life--TV, politics, movies, sports, all of which have undergone a multi-cultural sea change since our generation grew up. (Something parallel has happened with the women's movement; not an accident it's Obama versus Hillary, the last two standing.) Obama not only addresses the different experience of this new generation, he EMBODIES it. His politics is a new synthesis that, frankly, no one of our generation would have been capable of assembling.
Let me repeat that: our generation could not have produced this movement. It is a movement emerging from a zeitgeist we are, at best, sympathetic observers to and maybe players on the edge of. But to be creative, to be protean, in it--none of us could have done it. Our generation in America has been president or vice president for 20 years. A generation. Obama is about the world having moved on. It's about the world we made the space for but is not our creation.
I spent time with a veteran of the civil rights movement last night, 67 years old, from Alabama, still, consciously, speaks like it. He says that Obama, though no one could have foreseen it quite, and the generation of our children (his daughter went to Harvard Med School and now works at the Mayo Clinic, a very famous and high-powered medical institution in this country--in Minnesota), that is, the movement that Obama represents and the generation that it has mobilized, is what the success, the triumph, of the old civil rights movement has wound up looking like. It is OF the society, not attacking the society; it is Obama, not Jesse jackson or Al Sharpton. (To continue the earlier women's movement parallels, Hillary is still too much the women's equivalent of Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton; she could never embody the post-racial, or the post-feminist, zeitgeist.)
My own data point on the matter: Months ago, I was with my cousin's son; 25 years old now, a lawyer in a posh firm in SF; Berkeley undergrad, Columbia law school; a person for whom Facebook is as essential to his life as a phone is to you or me; he said that EVERYBODY he knows is for Obama. Everybody??? I asked. Maybe a couple of people, he said, from the Edwards campaign of 2004, are still for Edwards (as I was.) But that won't last... (and it didn't.)
I used to be fond of saying I came to Berkeley in 1970 and everybody I met was convinced he or she was going to make a revolution. The only person who succeeded in this was Alice Waters--who produced a profound revolution in cooking and a country's relationship to eating. Then too, there were the tech guys. They produced a revolution the old-fashioned way--revolutionizing the means of production. But for the rest of us, the politicos, revolution was not to be. Counter-revolution, maybe, a right wing in power to be endured and fought against, but not our revolution. I am convinced that if Obama wins the nomination, and wins the general election (and so far his campaign seems smart enough to anticipate and deal with what the Republicans will throw at him--the above "surrender" issues; probably his 'radical youth'; plus tons of stuff I can't even think of.) But if he gets there, and wins the election, the day after election day in this country is going to feel like the closest thing to revolution we will ever experience. People will walk along the streets, shaking their heads, looking at one another, saying "Did THAT just happen??...Did WE do THAT??..."
And, though it's wildly impressionistic, I suspect that people around the world will have their heads spinning, saying, "Did the Americans, NOW, the country making war in the Middle East and talking about nuking Iran, did THAT country just elect a president who is a person of color and is named Barack Hussein Obama.....No, that can't be possible...Could it?..."