Yes We Can

As the first of the Super Tuesday polls close, I want to share my thoughts about the Obama campaign’s unofficial slogan – Yes We Can. (I think we all like that better than the official slogan – Change We Can Believe In – which is at worst sort of confusing and at best not grammatical.)

We’ve got issues – huge whoppers. We’re stuck in a war we never should have chosen, our economy is burdened by terrible economic habits and fundamentals, we suffer from the terrible injustice of the best health care we know how to provide not being available to most, our nation of immigrants hates its permanent underclass of immigrants, opportunity is yet constrained by race and class, and even the planet’s future is grim and uncertain. We ride into battle against these challenges – challenges of a scope and scale that they definitively can not be solved without the federal government – led by a President no one likes, a congress even fewer people like, and a supreme court that thinks separate but equal is constitutional (and sometimes, like in the case of equal pay, separate but unequal is OK too.) It is possible – understandable, really – that an American citizen could look at this situation and say “No, we can’t fix this.”

But yes, we can. All we need to do it try, and we can fix this. The only thing that stops us from solving these problems – literally the only thing – is the health and vigor of our democracy. The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. Because when we say “No, we can’t fix this,” or when our political leaders (one of whom in particular, the subject of this criticism, I admire and respect a tremendous amount, more than when this campaign began) tell us that what we don’t need is false hope, people leave the process, and all who are left are those who stand to make money from perverting it. The only thing in history that has ever reliably defended the public interest is political participation, motivated by the belief in an ever more perfect union.

Yes We Can. I love to think of it as a slogan about Barack Obama becoming President, and I hope it is. But more than that, it is a progressive strategy for fixing our problems, about community. Whatever happens tonight, and whoever gets the nomination and ultimately wins the Presidency, this is the song that, when it is in enough of our hearts, will put us back on track.