Finally!

Well, I’m back in the States from St. Andrews and had the chance to observe, up close, the denouement of the Democratic nominating process. And, to paraphrase T.S. Eliot, it ended not with a bang but with a whimper. Maybe not even a whimper – it was more like a muddle.

Barack Obama moved past the new delegate threshold of 2118 (as a result of the Michigan/Florida rules committee compromise), Tuesday evening. Then Hillary Clinton won the South Dakota primary and followed it up with a rousing non-concession speech to her supporters in New York. Then Obama won the Montana primary and, from St. Paul Minnesota, announced that he had secured the party’s nomination. The next couple of days buzzed with questions such as: What was Clinton going to do? Would she take the vice presidential slot if it were offered? Would it in fact be offered?

Somewhat (fortunately not completely), lost in the static was the historic nature of Obama’s accomplishment. A little more than a half-century after Brown v. Board of Education, 40 some years after passage of the Civil Rights Act, an African-American has been nominated by a major party for the presidency of the United States. That’s the real story of this remarkable nominating process that began in Iowa back on January 3 and continued uninterrupted for the next five months. The American public now faces one of the most interesting presidential elections in years – two candidates, Obama and Senator John McCain, with very different personalities and sharply contrasting political agendas.

We’ll have one more blog, probably next week, on the way the November election looks as of now. Then I’ll be signing off for the summer and resuming in September, with my friend and colleague, Tom Murphy of the Caterham School in Surrey, England. He’ll be giving us his expert opinion and perspective from Britain before his visit to the States in mid-October. We’ll both be reporting on the fall campaign – it should be quite a show!