There is change in the air, at the polls

HOW HE SEES IT

There is change in the air, at the polls

By MARC FISHER

Washington Post

Win or lose, Barack Obama has changed America. It’s one thing to believe in a picture we’d like to be true — a society moving toward a colorblind ideal — and something entirely different to live each day with a personification of that ideal.

“I’ve actually changed my view of Americans,” said Marvin Lawson of Columbia, a black man who is retired and went with his wife, Victoria, to see Obama speak at the University of Maryland last week. “I’ve been pleasantly surprised. This country still has a racial divide; we cannot ignore that. But this campaign will take us to the next level, that we really are ready to accept those values we espouse as a nation.”

Obama won a majority of the white male vote in Virginia’s Democratic primary. He won a majority of the seniors there, too, according to exit polls.

Perhaps even more important, for the fall election and our polarized, low-participation polity, Obama drew hundreds of thousands of first-time primary voters to the polls. In Virginia, one-third of Democratic voters told pollsters they were participating in their first primary. In Maryland, more than twice as many people voted in Prince George’s County as in the primary four years earlier.

Generational shift

Still, we are experiencing a bump of the nation’s political tectonic plates. The changes have been happening for a long time, and we are only now realizing how deep they are. And those changes are not merely about racial attitudes. This is a generational shift as well. What first appeared to be a movement driven by college students is now winning the hearts and votes of boomers, the very crowd that had been the focal point of the Clintons’ appeal.

At the College Park rally, three women from Silver Spring, Md., talked about how Obama reminds them of the sense of possibility that permeated their idealistic youth.

“I brought my daughter here because I was thinking about when I was 8 and my mother took me out of school to see Robert Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson campaigning, and the school gave my mother a lot of grief about it,” Barbara Shulman said. “I’m just tired of Bill Clinton. I like this energy. And Obama can beat the Republicans.”

“My trust in the Clintons has eroded,” Leslie Garcia said. “This feels right.”

“How could we not be here?” Suzanne Mintz asked. “It’s just inspiring to see jazzed young people. This is the first election where I feel everybody’s voting for somebody and it’s not just the better of two evils.”

It’s not hard to imagine those same comments having been made about Bill Clinton 16 years ago, but time alters perspectives. Hillary Clinton today seems to many Democratic voters the embodiment of an inside operator, her experience pitch backfiring against her. Things change.