Why America is making history tonight
Posted: Tuesday, June 03, 2008 7:50 PM by Hardball
by Chris Matthews
I think our colleague Ron Allen said it best: “Every time I look at my Blackberry, it seems another superdelegate has gone over to Barack Obama.”
It’s been exactly five months to the day since voters in Iowa went to the polls on January 3 and opened the primary and caucus season. Tonight, South Dakota and Montana close the curtain on the voting. No more caucuses, no more primaries.
There are two big questions for tonight. The first is, will Obama win enough delegates tonight to win the Democratic nomination?
The second big question, what will Hillary Clinton do? Will she bow tonight to the impossible math confronting her or will she keep on fighting at least for a few more days? And of course, if and when Hillary does get out, will she press for number two? Late today, the Associated Press reported she told Democrats, “I am open to it.”
A moment of personal privilege here: Everyone remembers when the bad things happened in America. We all remember when JFK was killed, when Martin Luther King was killed, when Bobby Kennedy was killed. Everyone remember the tragic moments, especially with it comes to the civil rights struggle in this country, and the tragedies regarding race. Race relations is the San Andreas fault of this country.
Whatever you think of Barack Obama as a future president, whatever you think of Hillary Clinton or John McCain, the fact is, now, America is verging on being the first Western nation, white nation, if you will— not Australia, not Canada, not New Zealand, not England, not France, not any of the European countries— the first one in history to have an African-American real black man as a real 50-50 shot. Barack Obama will be a candidate of a major political party, and this is a stunning historic development.
I just don't want it to get caught in the weeds. I've always been a huge fan of Archbishop Tutu of South Africa. He got South Africa through apartheid, he's a great man. Here‘s an article on what he said the other day to “The Chicago Tribune.”
Unlike in South Africa's apartheid era, he [Tutu] said, where blacks were treated as "nothing," in America, "You say to them, 'You're equal, and the sky's the limit.' And they keep bumping their heads against this thing that's stopping them from reaching out to the stars."
Tutu is a tough critic—and yet he acknowledges that America has been able to produce a Barack Obama. Where else in the world would you ever have had anything like that? An African-American being not just a credible candidate but one who has galvanized people. Look at the number of young people who have come out and said, "Yes, we think it is actually possible to have a different kind of society only here." Tutu is one of the toughest guys and he's been on the racial front his whole career and whole life. And he says, "Yes, we got serious problems in this country. We got a wall of racial prejudice that's still out there in different places, and yet we've done something nobody else has done."
All this is still a few hours off. But I think we've got to think about this -- and it's got nothing to do with partisan politics: Americans should salute themselves and say this is one of the nights where people will want to ask, "Where were you when this happened?"
Chris Matthews discusses the importance of this historic night with Keith Olbermann.
