Opinion
November 23
On the night of Nov. 4, as I stood in Chicago's Grant Park with my wife Susan and our teenage daughter Stephanie, overcome with emotion and surrounded by throngs of celebrants, I couldn't help recalling the last time I stood in that park. What a difference 40 years had made.
It was a summer's night in 1968, another watershed moment in American politics, but not one of hope and possibility. It was a moment of profound sadness and lost opportunity when a great shadow seemed to descend over the land.
As a college student, I attended the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago as a page to the Massachusetts delegation. I was on the floor next to former Speaker of the House John McCormack on the night then-Vice President Hubert Humphrey was nominated over the anti-war candidate and then-Sen. Gene McCarthy (D-Minn.).
As the band played "Happy Days Are Here Again," television monitors in the back of the convention hall reported on events happening in Grant Park. What would later be called a "police riot" was unleashed against members of my generation who were demonstrating against the Vietnam War.
When the convention adjourned, we returned downtown in buses, and many of us went to Grant Park for a candle-light vigil to mark what had happened that evening in the Park, as well as what took place on the convention floor.
Later, I came to realize I'd witnessed the fracturing of the Democratic Party, as the White House became a wholly owned subsidiary of the Republican Party for the better part of 25 years.
As for me, 1968 soured me on electoral politics. After graduating, I moved to Lowell, Mass., to work for change in a different way — by practicing grassroots politics as a community organizer. It was similar to the work another community organizer would do on the South Side of Chicago a decade later.
Something else happened that night in Grant Park 40 years ago, though. The generation into which I was born, the Baby Boom generation, once filled with so much promise for America, lost its opportunity to lead America.
Boomers came of age hearing the echo of President John F. Kennedy's words, infected by the hope of a civil rights movement and the optimism of a war on poverty and emboldened by a sense of empowerment that we could end a war. We saw our dreams dissipate in urban riots, the assassination of our heroes and on a summer's night in Chicago.
Our generation got a second chance to lead in 1992, and we did much better. But along with the best of our idealism and energy, we brought to the national stage a lack of discipline and narcissism. Again, the nation reacted as it had before, electing and re-electing George W. Bush, a baby boomer with a different outlook. We were a polarizing generation.
Now, standing there on election night, those memories of four decades and all the changes I have seen in American politics ran through my mind as I watched a crowd that was filled first with relief and then with unrestrained jubilation over Barack Obama's victory. It was a stunning moment. In what seemed like the blink of an eye, the cloud which had cast its shadow across America and the world was lifted, and a new day dawned.
Election night in Grant Park saw the end of an era and a new one's beginning. Barack Obama's ascension represents the turning of a page from one generation to another.
The Obama-Biden ticket carried voters between the ages of 18 and 29 by better than two to one and voters between the ages of 30 to 44 by a decisive seven-point margin. The time has come for a new generation to lead as witnessed on that night.
Standing once again in Grant Park with my wife Susan and our teenage daughter Stephanie, I felt a surge of confidence in this next generation. Growing up in a world of diversity, they are blind to the color of a person's skin and accepting of all the differences among God's children. Oriented toward activism, they are free of ideological straitjackets and partisan roadblocks. They see in politics and government the vehicles for taking care of one another and the instruments for repairing this country and the world.
To all those who saw the Obama campaign as an improbable journey, I say this was always its destiny. Coming from another generation, I feel lucky to have planted my flag with this new one.
