Election Day in Beijing

Crushed into a corner on the second floor of a Wudaokou café at noon on Election Day, I saw something incredible. I saw a small room full of no less than 500 young citizens of the world in Beijing, China leap from their seats in unison to the sound of crashing coffee cups in a unanimous salute to the 44^th President of the United States of America. They were mostly Americans, of course, but there were also in attendance many Canadians, Germans, French, Italians, with students, faculty, and expatriates from other countries besides. Many of them had been coming to this café for months to watch each presidential and vice-presidential debate via satellite, getting to know one another over caffeinated beverages and discussion stemming from articles displayed on laptop screens. The historic moment was made more surreal and disorienting for us Americans by the fact that we were celebrating together in Beijing, thousands of miles away from the land that this man, Barack Obama, now will oversee as our Commander and Chief. Cold buckets of Tsingtao were passed around the room, and everyone in the place was treated to a free celebratory beer as we watched the concession and victory speeches. People that didn’t know one another previously were hugging one another, while others sat on chairs, stood on couches, or crouched in corners wearing expressions of stunned disbelief. A man named “Obama” is the president of our country?

I participated in this electoral cycle primarily through an organization run out of the Bridge Café called Democrats for Obama in China. The woman who organized the viewings of all of the debates and the election party was also responsible for registering hundreds of voters and assisting many more in obtaining absentee ballots. To see her and her team working as hard as they were here in China to make sure that everyone who could vote did vote in this upcoming election … it demonstrated and enthusiasm and excitement about the process that was absolutely infectious to me and many others. It got me more excited to stay up-to-date on platforms and current news in America in the midst of my classes and Mandarin lessons, and it caused me to reevaluate the urgency with which I approached voting in this year’s election. I can only hope that I am able to take some degree of this zeal and spread it around to the electoral cycles to come later in my life.

This election has proved to me how poorly versed I am in American politics. It has excited me, many of my colleagues, and essentially every young person I know in Beijing to follow each and every debate, report, and sound byte as closely as we could from our respective apartments scattered across campus and the city. I thought that I had a decent knowledge of civics and government from my courses in middle and high school, but when my Chinese students and not I were able to pick up on the fact that I incorrectly cited a quote in class as coming from Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, when in fact it came from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, it becomes clear that I need to reinvest some time and energy in getting better up to speed on the finer points of my native country’s oratory and history in general.

I do have a fair amount of apprehension about the Obama presidency. I think that his presence in office has many people—ridiculously and illegitimately, of course—terrified that either the Antichrist has arrived or that we are now being led to our doom by a minion of Al Qaeda, and to think and to hear how strongly that these misinformed people feel about an Obama presidency makes me fear for the President-Elect’s well-being. I think that the subtle, clever “Potomac two-step” that Obama has been offering the American electorate—involving his running on the promise of a virtuous, color-blind, “post-racial” America that can only be realized in 2008 by the election of an African American—represents an avoidance or sidestep around an issues-based race for the Presidency that Obama advocated otherwise. It flips the issue brilliantly to making a demand on the character of the electorate to display that they are in fact “post-racial” and virtuous because they voted for Barack Obama. I think there were most definitely many folks who advocated the advancement of racial equality in America who for one reason or another voted for John McCain.

I think, also, that President-Elect Obama is a panderer whose eloquence is often employed in appeasing supporters of both sides of a contentious issue. Appeasement (see: Neville Chamberlain) is rarely a viable solution when it comes to dealing with forces in this world that can be, at times, fundamentally good or bad, right or wrong. We will of course see in the coming months and years some proof or disproof of his mettle, and I hope for the best.

And (if I could wax poetic for a second) I think this is what President-Elect Obama offers me and many others: hope. Hope is the vague term of all vagaries, but I think, too, that it can be an incredible source of real strength for humanity, as I hope it will be now for Americans. America is not “post-racial” now—there are still black folks and white folks there—and it may never become so, but I hope that Obama’s election to the office of President will help civilization advance towards that elusive goal of allowing us to evaluate one another not as “white people” or “black people” or “yellow people,” but “people.”

I think this country is heading in the right direction right now by having a new face with new power connections and with new ideas in the White House. His economic policy is wide-sweeping and will help to get more people involved at more levels of the American economy, rather than relying on things “trickling down” from the richest of the rich to the poorest of the poor. I am absolutely in favor of his idea of making some kind of volunteer service mandatory for young Americans, and I think that there is no better time than war time to consider thinking about instituting some kind of New Deal-type economic stimulus plan. I think Obama’s willingness to experiment with and ability to wield “soft power” ideology, when combined with his personal background, will allow him unprecedented access in terms of negotiating with reasonable leaders throughout the world who were previously averse to sitting down and speaking with America about solutions to problems that did not involve SAM sites and muzzle bursts. For those of my friends involved with the military, it seems to me that you will have plenty of job security for the foreseeable future, with things now picking up rather than tapering off with a resurgent and aggressive Russia, al-Shabab in Somalia and Al Qaeda in northern Pakistan and Afghanistan, to name just a few.

The future seems like a bright one, and it has been a pleasure to share in marveling at that brightness with my students in class this week. In my speaking classes, I compared and contrasted Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have A Dream” speech with Obama’s victory speech, trying to identify similarities in terms of structure, pacing, rhetorical devices, and influences. Almost everyone had heard the “I Have A Dream” speech before. Several freshmen already had whole chunks of Obama’s victory speech memorized. Smiling, they recited these passages in unison with America’s new president as they listened to him speak in class.