An Obama-Carter Reality Check

For months people have been asking whether Barack Obama's race made him unelectable. In Iowa, he put an entirely different question on the table: are Americans ready to vote for idealism over hard-edged realism, for hope over experience? By framing his candidacy in such a way, he makes talk of racial limits, or racial voting, almost irrelevant—and makes a virtue of his biggest supposed weakness, his inexperience in actual governing. The question, of course, is whether that framing can deliver him to the White House and, if it does, whether it inevitably invites disappointment.

We have arrived, to use Obama's phrase, at what may be a "defining moment in history." Many Americans are fed up with what they see as a cynical, even corrupt, Washington establishment. There is a hunger for a new direction, and for a knight with a shiny new lance.

This is a moment similar to where the country was in 1976, when another largely untested idealist won Iowa's Democratic caucus. The nation, discombobulated by Watergate, was ready to turn to a born-again Baptist who believed the world could be a more moral place. At the time, Jimmy Carter was the face of the New South. When inaugurated as Georgia's governor in 1971, he proclaimed the dawning of a new day. "I say to you quite frankly that the time for racial discrimination is over," Carter said. He went on to streamline Georgia's government, while opening opportunities for women and blacks. He imbued his presidential campaign with equally high expectations. "For America's third century, why not our best?" he asked. But he foundered in office and was turned out after one term with an approval rating of 34 percent, having laid the ground for the Reagan Revolution.

Obama has set expectations even higher than Carter. In his rousing victory speech, Obama praised Iowans for writing themselves into history. The self-congratulatory rhetoric is certainly merited. Obama's candidacy, even if it ultimately collapses, has already had a huge impact on American perceptions. He has proved that a black man is not necessarily a fool to aspire to be president of the United States, which, odd as in may seem in the wake of Obama's triumph, was something no previous generation could take for granted.

Donna Brazile, who managed Al Gore's presidential campaign, called Obama's win in Iowa "a victory for the country, for national reconciliation … It signals to voters in Super Tuesday states that he is electable … He's proven he can win a general election." For Brazile, that was a moment worth savoring; for in winning so convincingly in an overwhelmingly white state, Obama showed the promise of America. "Those voters put aside whatever racial fears they had," said Brazile. "They saw the person, not the color … Last night that state was colorblind."

All the celebrating notwithstanding, Obama is still a long way from wrapping up the nomination, much less the election. For all his allusions to harmony and change, he has not yet demonstrated that we have ceased to be "a collection of Red States and Blue States," as he put it, but are one, united America.