An open letter to President-Elect Barack Obama.
Dear President-Elect Obama:
First, I would like to congratulate you on winning the election. It was, without a doubt, historic in ways we have yet fully begun to absorb, and I’m proud to have been a small part of that history.
I have been watching your career with interest from the minute you won your seat in the Senate. I saw you on Letterman saying you weren’t thinking about running for president in 2008, and I knew right then that you would run for president in 2008. I didn’t know you were going to win, but I knew without a doubt that you would run.
Fast-forward to when you declared your candidacy. You and Hillary Clinton in the same primary? It seemed like an embarrassment of riches. I am a Taiwanese-American woman, so you can probably understand why I was doubly-excited about this election cycle. However, when the first rounds of female voters vs. black voters started in the media, I felt my first seeds of discomfort.
Let me backtrack by saying I’m a lifelong Democrat. I was out of the country the first time I was eligible to vote, but I would have voted for Clinton–Bill, that is. Four years later, I voted for Nader after making sure that Clinton was going to be re-elected. I wanted to make a statement against our two-party system, but I would have voted for Clinton if it had been close. Four years later, I voted for Gore out of a sense of duty. Even then, I knew what a disaster W. would be, and I did not want to see the latter in charge of my country. Four pain-filled years later, I voted for John Kerry for the same reason. None of these candidates personally excited me, but I voted for them out of a sense of duty.
You were different. I have backed you from the start, and I never wavered in my belief that you were MY candidate. I went back and forth between you and Hillary for five minutes, but I knew that I wanted you. Ideally, it would have been a dual ticket, but that was not meant to be.
My excitement for the primaries fizzled out completely after John Edwards dropped out of the race, leaving just you and Hillary. Why? Because now all the pundits were bleating about, “Who will the white male Democrat vote for now?” as if it were an important issue. I have never been able to vote for someone who looked like me (and I highly doubt I ever will), but that never stopped me from voting. I didn’t have much sympathy for white male Dems, I must confess.
Throughout the campaign, the media always talked about this important group or that, and I never was mentioned–not once. You were the only candidate who talked about Asians as if we actually existed, and you did it consistently. I know your half-sister is half-Asian, so that’s probably a big reason why you included the ‘invisible minority’, but I was grateful to be acknowledged, however tangentially.
Once you sewed up the nomination for the Democratic Party, I began to get interested in the race again. I listened to several of your speeches, and I was immediately engaged in what you had to say. You have the ability to speak eloquently about substantive things. Let me be clear. I am not an Obamaphile. I don’t think you are ‘the one’ or that everything will be perfect now that you are president. I knew that you are more pragmatic and, yes, conservative than I. I knew that you professed marriage to be between one man and one woman because of your religion (though I did not know that apparently, you used to believe differently). I knew that there would be times I disagreed with you. I was fine with that, but then, you had to pull a Rick Warren out of your bag of political tricks.
I’m getting ahead of myself.
I watched compulsively and obsessively the entire election night. I watched as the returns came in, and I feared that it wouldn’t happen. Even with the mounting evidence that you would, indeed, be elected President of the United States, I was biting my nails and trying to calm my churning stomach. Then, when Keith Olbermann called the race for you, I wept.
I bawled. I didn’t just let out a trickle or two, I let it all out. Months of tension, fear, hope, anticipation, and dread flowed out of me for several minutes. Every time I thought I had it under control, the tears would come streaming out again.
I wept because I never thought I’d live to see the day we’d elect a black man president of this country. I wept because for once, I felt like I had a voice in the White House. I wept because I could see myself represented by you. I wept because for once in my life, my country did something that showed I had a place in it. I didn’t have to stand on the fringes, outside looking in. I was now invited to dine at the country’s table, to badly mix my metaphors.
I felt the hope you had been advocating at every stop during your campaign. I felt the country really was ready for the change you envisioned. I was in the live forum on a political blog (Mudflats) when the race was called, and I felt like part of a community as we rejoiced together. And I wept.
Hm. This is getting to be much longer than I had planned. I’ll write part two tomorrow.
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