id="ud113632d-ef7c-597a-bec2-5872739f80eb">
MATT FREI
Only in America
For my family George, Amelia, Lottie, Alice and Penny
CONTENTS
Black Man Given Nation’s Worst Job
8 Defenders of the Constitution or Scum of the Earth?
14 Whose American Dream is it Anyway?
BLACK MAN GIVEN NATION’S WORST JOB
The National Mall is the Circus Maximus of Washington, DC. Instead of chariot races and gladiatorial battles, it plays benign host to rallies, concerts, charitable walks against breast cancer or armies of tourists shuffling dutifully past the war monuments, the shrines to the Founding Fathers and the museums that form the granite and marble core of a city that refers to itself, somewhat self-consciously, as ‘the Nation’s Capital’. The steps to the grandiose Lincoln Memorial, illuminated at night like a pop-up Parthenon, were glistening with early November drizzle. It was one in the morning and a small crowd had gathered at the foot of the lugubrious Abraham Lincoln, a giant sitting back in his huge throne, in brooding disapproval of the world around him.
It was a motley gathering of students, tourists and some interns from Capitol Hill, clutching a bottle of champagne. They were all huddled around a radio as if listening intently to football scores. But the mood was too intimate and reverential for sport. In any case this was the middle of the night. One of the women, an African American, was crying silently as she listened. The make-up on a young white woman’s face was smudged with tears or rain. I couldn’t tell. What seeped out of the small wireless wasn’t the excitable voice of a sports commentator. It was the brown-sugar baritone of a politician. The voice rose and fell as if delivering a sermon. And when the speaker said that ‘the true strength of our nation is not the might of our arms or the scale of our wealth but the enduring power of our ideas’ the small radio crackled and hissed to the sound of mass applause. The gathering at the Lincoln Memorial nodded silently in collective approval. In the distance someone was hollering with apparent joy. A car passed by blaring out the popular country song ‘Only in America’.
Half a mile away at the White House a much bigger crowd had assembled. Washington, DC doesn’t usually go in for spontaneous human gatherings, especially in the middle of the night. But something had brought the streets to life. The sound of car horns echoed off the inscrutable glass and steel towers on K Street, home to the city’s most powerful lobbying firms. Even the anti-nuclear protester who has been living in his tent outside the White House for as long as I can remember, forever threatening but thankfully never achieving self-immolation, had crept out of his lair and was now staring through the black wrought-iron gates of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. There was nothing to see. George and Laura Bush, famous for retiring to bed early, were probably fast asleep by now. A lone sharpshooter was patrolling the roof.
But the crowd had not come to gawp. They had come to imagine. In a few months a family would reside here that descended from the slaves who had helped to build this replica of a Virginia tobacco planter’s mansion two centuries earlier. As an African American, Barack Obama could have been legally owned by America’s first sixteen Presidents. Now he and his wife Michelle and their daughters Sasha and Malia would move into the White House, not as cooks, cleaners or advisers, but as the First Family. Millions of Americans doubtlessly felt that such an event was horribly overdue. Millions more around the world had doubted it would ever come to pass. The airwaves, the internet, the newspapers had been filled for months with meticulous polling data, touch-screen electoral maps and convoluted conjecture about why an African American would be acceptable to a largely white electorate. Or why not. Entire days of broadcasting time had been spent discussing the so-called Bradley Effect, named after a former African American candidate for the governorship of California who was soaring in the opinion polls but lost in the privacy of the polling booth because too many voters were simply too racist. But that was 1982 and this was now 2008. And wherever you were on that night and whoever you wanted to win, you had to pinch yourself that on 4 November sixty-two million Americans had elected a forty-seven-year-old black Senator called Barack Hussein Obama to be the forty-fourth President of the most powerful nation on earth.
Call it the stomach-knot-forming sensation of history. And what formed that knot weren’t the returns from those crucial swing states of Ohio or Pennsylvania, or the moment that California and Washington state tipped him over the 270 electoral votes that a candidate needs to win. No, it was the simple image of seeing America’s