Leadership

It's quite an election. I'm wondering if this is happening because it's the right time, or it's the right time because the right guy has come along. I'm thinking for other black pioneers, breaking the race barrier was just the beginning of the story. Jackie Robinson, for instance, had to be better than white baseball players, in all kinds of ways, in order to succeed as a major league baseball player; any failure, even a temporary or predictable shortcoming, would have been used to confirm racial stereotypes of the day. I'm hoping it is different for Obama. It is an impossible job in the first place. He may or may not excel in whole or in part; he may or may not fail in whole or in part. We need to be past the point at which the judgment of his performance in this job will be a report card for the inherent qualities of his race. We need for race not to be the issue of his presidency. I think it may be the right time because of the black pioneers that have come before him, and the heritage and perspective they have given all of us; I think of Booker T. Washington, Martin Luther King, Jr., Jackie Robinson, Bill Cosby, Opray Winfrey - and many, many others who have weaved into and enriched the fabric of our culture, for their race and beyond their race for all of us. I think he might be the right person because of his apparent calmness and confidence in the eye of the perfect storm.

For some reason this morning I thought about president Kennedy's announcement, May 21, 1961, that the US would put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. By any objective analysis, this was nothing more than "trash talk" aimed at the Soviets who seemed to have taken an advantage in the cold war by launching their rocket. Yet, we did it. The world we know today has been shaped by the technology, knowledge, spirit and confidence engendered by that effort.
In the end, I think that the true measure of leadership is in reaching for goals beyond our grasp. Encouraging us to do merely what it is clearly within our abilities and strengths turns out to be just cheerleading.

So, when there seems to be so little to cheer about, what we clearly need is a leader.