Barack Obama: The End Of Small Politics

By Barack Obama, AlterNet. Posted June 19, 2006.

Editor's Note: These remarks are excerpted from a speech Obama delivered at the Take Back America conference on June 14, 2006. Click here to watch a video of the speech.

We meet at a time where we find ourselves at a crossroads in American history. It's a time where you can go into any town hall or veterans' hall or coffee shop or street corner and you'll hear people express the same anxiety about the future. You'll hear them convey the same uncertainty about the direction that we're headed as a country. Whether it's the war or Katrina or health care or outsourcing, you'll hear people say that, now, surely we've come to a moment where things have to change. And there are Americans who still believe in an America where anything's possible; they're just not sure that their leaders still do. They still believe in dreaming big dreams but they suspect maybe that their leaders have forgotten how.

I remember when I first ran for the state senate -- this was my very first race -- back in Chicago ... people would say, you seem like a nice young man. They would look over my literature. They would say, you have a fancy law degree, you teach at a fine law school, you've done fine work, you've got a beautiful family -- why would you want to go into something dirty and nasty like politics? Why would you want to go into politics?

And the question is understandable and it bears on today because even those of us who are involved, even those of us who are active in the political process and in civic life, there are times where all of us feel discouraged sometimes, where we get cynical about the prospects for politics because it seems as if sometimes that politics is treated as a business and not a mission, and that power is always trumping principle, and that we have leaders that are sometimes long on rhetoric but short on substance, and so we get discouraged. And every two years or fours years maybe we do our bit and we knock on doors or pass our literature, or we go into the polling place and hold our noses and vote for the lesser of two evils, but we don't feel in our gut sometimes that politics and government is going to improve our lives. At most, we hope it does us no harm.

And I am not immune to those feelings. But, you know, when I get in that funk, I think about a person I met the day before I was elected to the United States Senate ...[M]y staff comes up to me and says, senator, before you go up, there's this woman who wants to meet you. And she's driven a long way and she's a big supporter and she just wants to take a picture with you and shake your hand. And I say, well, that's not a problem. And so I go offstage to a back room and I meet this woman. She explains that she has supported me since I announced my race. She shakes my hand, we take a picture, she tells me that she's proud of me. And she had already cast her ballot at that point absentee, and she was really appreciative of the work that I was doing and wished me Godspeed.

And none of this would have been exceptional except for the fact that this woman, named Marguerite Lewis, had been born in Louisiana in 1899 and was 105 years old. And so ever since I met this frail 105-year-old African American woman who found the strength to leave her house and come to a rally because she believed that her voice mattered, I've thought about all that she's seen in her life.

I thought about the fact that she was born at a time when there were no cars on the road and there were no airplanes in the sky; born in the wake of slavery, in the shadow of Jim Crow, a time when it was far more frequent for African Americans to be lynched than to vote. I thought about how she lived through a world war and a Great Depression and another world war. And then she saw her brothers, her uncles, her cousins coming back from that second war and still have to sit at the back of the bus. And I thought about how she finally saw women win the right to vote. And how she watched FDR lift millions out of fear and send millions to college on the GI Bill and bring folks out of poverty, and how she saw unions rise up and give them a foothold into the middle class. And she saw millions of immigrants travel from distant shores in search of this idea that we call America.

And she believed in this idea of America, despite the cards that she had been dealt. She believed in this notion of a more perfect union. And when she saw, in the distance, breaking out the civil rights movement over the horizon, she thought, well, maybe it's my turn now. And she saw women who were willing to walk instead of ride the bus after a long day of doing someone else's laundry or looking after somebody else's children because they were walking for their freedom. And she saw people of every race and creed -- young people get on buses and travel down to Mississippi and Alabama to register voters. And she saw four little girls die needlessly in Sunday school and saw how it catalyzed a nation. And at last she saw the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. And she saw people lining up to vote for the first time and she got in that line and she never forgot it. And she kept on voting in each and every election because she believed.

Barack Obama is a U.S. senator from Illinois.

Liked this story? Get top stories in your inbox each week from AlterNet! Sign up now »