Four years ago, Barack Obama edged John McCain in Chicago, 1.1 million to 150,000.
And remember the ecstasy downtown that night? An estimated 175,000 jammed Grant Park, and they unleashed a deafening roar when their hero took the stage. Strangers embraced on Loop sidewalks, and there was dancing on State Street. Mechelene Head, a 40-year-old Lawndale resident, burst into tears as she told a Sun-Times reporter, “This is the best thing that has ever happened to me.” Angel Castillo, a 19-year-old University of Illinois at Chicago student, said, “I am going to be able to talk about this to my kids.”
—Steve Bogira
The three groups spent the next several hours getting to know each other. To Krieglstein, it was a telling mix: he and his brother, the late-20s entrepreneurs born into a politically charged and hyperintellectual family (just the afternoon before, he’d completed his three-hour oral exams for a master’s in clinical psychology from the Illinois Institute of Technology); the energized undergrad contingent that came out for Obama in record numbers; and the hopeful family members from an historically overlooked urban swath who were about to witness someone with a background very much like their own become the first African-American president.
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Krieglstein felt that he and his brother were not only fulfilling a family legacy; they were participating in the next chapter of the nation’s history. “Our grandmother having been a part of that early struggle—and then us being there to celebrate probably the greatest symbol of triumph over that struggle—felt like full circle.”
Looking back on that day from the distance of four years and through a filter of disappointments (civilian deaths attributed to drones, Guantanamo, a drug policy that shuttered medical-marijuana clinics), Krieglstein admits the perils of the president-as-symbol line of thinking: a single individual imbued with so much weighted meaning tends to eclipse our ability to parse the issues he’s fighting for, leaving him vulnerable to disenchantment once the veil of symbolism lifts.
“I don’t diminish that moment in time, I don’t diminish the hype around it. We’re one of the only developed democracies in the world that elected a minority to the highest office.”
Join the Reader‘s Mick Dumke, WBEZ’s Justin Kaufmann, two of these voters, and more for some good-natured political debate on Mon 10/29 at Martyrs’, 3855 N. Lincoln.
