By FRANK BRUNI
On Tuesday the nation’s fretful, hopeful voters will finally have their say, and none of the rigorously calibrated polls or demographically incisive analysts out there can tell us with any certainty what will happen.
Will one candidate win by millions, or lose by thousands? If there is a clear victor, will he be the first black American ever elected to the presidency, or the oldest American ever to win a first term?
We don’t need to know the answers to be certain of this much: no matter the outcome, it will be the climax of one of the most extraordinary presidential elections in this nation’s 232-year history, and “the first” and “the oldest” capture only some of what has made it so remarkable.
Whether judged by the milestones reached, the paradigms challenged, the passions stirred or simply the numbers — the 85 percent of Americans who believe the country is on the wrong track, or the record-demolishing $640 million fund-raising mark that Barack Obama passed by mid-October — the election of 2008 actually warrants the sorts of adjectives and phrases that are often just journalistic tics: epochal, pivotal, historic, once-in-a-lifetime.
It’s been so rich with precedent and incident — and so very, very long — that we have, if anything, undervalued and even lost sight of its significance at times. In these final hours there’s some sense in pausing, pulling back and taking the broad measure of a contest that’s sure to affect not only this country’s civic life but also its emotional and psychological landscape for some time to come.
Much of its impact boils down, yes, to race and gender, Mr. Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton and Sarah Palin, who could become the nation’s first female vice president.
In this fiercely waged election, longstanding barriers were challenged and toppled, at times to the seeming surprise of the person doing the toppling.
Think back. When Mr. Obama took the stage in Iowa after his victory in the state’s caucuses last January, he was not yet the favorite for the Democratic nomination, and he was a long way from becoming the general-election frontrunner.
In videotape from that night, you can see and sense an astonishment and exhilaration — in him, around him — that seem almost quaint just 10 months later.
“They said this day would never come,” he tells a euphoric Iowa crowd, and not just his eyes but the whole of him twinkles, gleams. “They said our sights were set too high.”
While he’s talking specifically about himself and his campaign troops, it’s impossible not to hear in his words a statement about all minorities in America, for whom the week-by-week, month-by-month advance of his candidacy would hold an especially powerful message.
The writer Ta-Nehisi Coates observed that as Mr. Obama’s quest for the presidency caught fire, “I knew, for the first time in my life, that it would be a good year to be black.”
“Consider this fact: the most famous black man in America isn’t dribbling a ball or clutching a microphone,” Mr. Coates continued, in a recent essay for Time magazine. “He has no prison record. He has not built a career on four-letter words.”
‚ÄúWords like hope, change and progress might seem like na?Øve campaign sloganeering in a dark age,‚Äù Mr. Coates further wrote. ‚ÄúBut think of the way those words ring for a people whose forebears marched into billy clubs and dogs, whose ancestors fled north by starlight, feeling the moss on the backs of trees.‚Äù
Over the course of a campaign that was part therapy session, part consciousness-raising seminar, a few of the principal players took on meanings much, much larger than themselves. Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton became vessels for the aspirations and frustrations of entire classes of aggrieved Americans. Their journeys encouraged the airing of hurts and the discussion of difficult issues.
In Philadelphia in March, Mr. Obama delivered a set-piece speech that sought to do nothing less than explain centuries of racial enmity and move Americans past it. In New Hampshire in January, Mrs. Clinton welled with tears that became catalysts for a charged examination of the treatment of women in American life.
Was sexism more potent than racism? This was the sort of impossible question raised on television shows and in newspapers, at restaurant counters and kitchen tables, revolving around Senator Clinton in winter and spring, Governor Palin in summer and fall.
For many of Mrs. Clinton’s supporters she was Everywoman, called on to prove her toughness without wholly abandoning her softness, asked in the end to yield once more to an ambitious, impatient man. Come Tuesday, will these supporters be haunted anew by what might have been? And will they be haunted more by an Obama victory or an Obama defeat?
How will some younger voters react if Mr. McCain prevails? Or some older ones if Mr. Obama does? In recent weeks, the ire and ugly catcalls of some supporters of the McCain-Palin ticket have suggested a division in this election that goes well beyond tax policy or Iraq strategy.
There’s more generational, cultural and stylistic difference between Mr. McCain and Mr. Obama, ages 72 and 47, than between rivals in most presidential contests over the last half-century.
Bill Clinton and the first President Bush were three years closer in age, and while Mr. Clinton’s victory marked the ascension of baby boomers, Mr. Obama’s election would be emblematic of something more profound: that the multicultural, postracial society so often discussed in the news media but so seldom affirmed in public life was now, literally, the face of our nation. Mr. Clinton was Fleetwood Mac. Mr. Obama is India.Arie.
Candidates in many past presidential contests lacked life stories as compelling as those of Mr. Obama, the son of a man from Kenya and a woman from Kansas, and Mr. McCain, who endured years of imprisonment and torture in Vietnam.
But these two weren’t the only vivid characters in a campaign that, purely as narrative, proved sensational.
Who would have believed, at its start, that Mike Huckabee was going to outlast Rudy Giuliani? That John Edwards’s pledges of support for his seriously ill wife were going to give way to a public apology for infidelity?
That Mr. Obama would choose a running mate who once described him, in terms of plausible aspirants to the White House, as “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean?” That Mr. McCain would choose a running mate who could field-dress a moose and would take the stage at the Republican convention with a pregnant, unwed teenage daughter in tow?
Perhaps that’s one reason voters paid such close attention. In any case, the 2008 election contradicted any and all claims that Americans were alienated from politics.
Although cable news was supposed to be moribund, programs devoted to politics got some of their best ratings in years. “Saturday Night Live” sailed temporarily into prime time on the winds of political parody. An average of about 34.5 million viewers a night tuned into the Republican convention, versus 22.6 million in 2004. For the Democratic convention, viewership rose to an average of 30.2 million from 20.4 million four years ago.
“We’re seeing record levels of interest in the campaign,” said Michael P. McDonald, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and an associate professor at George Mason University who studies voting patterns. Mr. McDonald cited evidence like new voter registration and responses in polls that asked how interested in the election voters were.
And he extrapolated from that to predict turnout of 64 percent, which would be the highest since 1908, when, he said, 65.7 percent of those Americans eligible to vote did. He said that just under 64 percent voted in the Kennedy-Nixon election of 1960, adding that 2008 turnout could top that.
One of the most striking measures of voters’ engagement has been Mr. Obama’s fund-raising, built in large measure on small donations made over the Internet. The final total may well exceed $700 million. In the 2004 election, the presidential candidates combined raised $684 million before their conventions, after which President Bush and Senator John F. Kerry took public financing.
Only Mr. McCain did that this time, and as a condition has had to limit his spending between the convention and Election Day to $84 million. Mr. Obama broke an early promise to take public financing and thus evaded such limits. He spent $21 million on television advertising alone during one week in October.
If Mr. Obama wins by a wide margin on Tuesday, that victory will reflect more than strides in race relations, thirst for change and the strength of his appeal. It will also reflect the power of money, and it could usher in the end of general-election candidates participating in the public financing system.
An Obama victory could redraw the political map, patches of red becoming blue or at least purple, swaths of the South no longer conceded to Republicans from the start.
So many other assumptions have been upended already. A black man with an exotic-sounding name wasn’t supposed to flourish in an overwhelmingly white state like Iowa, but Mr. Obama beat Mr. Edwards and Mrs. Clinton there by 8 percentage points.
Someone who failed to win Democratic primaries in New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania, California, New York and New Jersey wouldn’t seem to be on a successful path to the Democratic nomination, but Mr. Obama was.
He hasn’t fit neatly into the usual paradigms, and that could manifest itself in some way in Tuesday’s voting — if this election, like the 1980 race between President Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, will reveal some new political dynamics and yield some new political alignments.
Are we still the center-right country we’ve heard so much about over the last decade? Mr. Obama’s success even to this point calls that into question, just as Mr. McCain’s triumph in the Republican primaries raises doubts about the putative sway of religious conservatives within — and beyond — his party. The 2008 election suggests an evolving body politic, not a palsied one.
Then again it’s hard to tell, because what may ultimately be most extraordinary about this election is its context. The country is facing what is widely regarded as the greatest financial crisis since the Depression, and that’s not just election-season hyperbole. America is fighting wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan. And its claim to global leadership is being undercut by Russia, which defied the will of the West in invading Georgia last summer, and China, which staged an Olympics that was the envy of the world.
The 2008 presidential election stands out from so many before it, and will have repercussions for so many after it, because it’s a decision about who can guide us through the worst of times. We’re in trouble if we get it wrong. And maybe even if we get it right.
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