Obama's Youth-Driven Movement: "South Carolina will prove no aberration."

NYT op-ed: Obama's Youth-Driven Movement
By ROGER COHEN
Published: January 28, 2008

GREELEYVILLE, South Carolina – Something is stirring in the U.S.A.. Even in this depressed corner of the country, a place where trains no longer stop and poor families get water from shallow wells, you feel it. A political campaign has become a movement with Barack Obama at its head.

Campaigns are planned. But movements are full of impromptu decisions like the one that delivered Bryant Jones, 25, to this backwater. A few days ago, Jones, who is white and has always leaned Republican, jumped in his car and drove seven hours from Washington D.C. to campaign for Obama, a black Democrat. “It was his all-encompassing message that got to me,” Jones, a student at George Washington University said. “I feel uplifted by him.”...

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This young man represents something important. A new generation – for whom race is an issue overcome and baby-boomers are old folk fighting arcane battles and post-9/11 thinking must cede to post-post-9/11 creativity – is hungry for hope and willing to come even to places as hopeless as Greeleyville to demonstrate that. Obama rightly mocks those who dismiss him as a naïve “hopemonger” and say he has to be “seasoned” in order to “boil all the hope out of him.”

This war-stretched, recession-menaced country is confronted by “the fierce urgency of now,” as Martin Luther King put it. A Republican-leaning white kid feels that urgency and makes a political leap, as have myriad others. In the makeshift Obama campaign center in Greeleyville, I also stumbled on seven Harvard students who’d driven for 16 hours to get out the vote for their post-baby-boom candidate. “I’m here because I believe Obama has a chance at greatness,” said Kishore Kuchibhotla, 27, who’s studying for a biophysics doctorate....

When campaigns become movements, barriers fall. Crumbling Greeleyville has surely never before seen seven Harvard students being offered fried pig skins before going to canvass in African-American homes with well water – and then heading back for class Monday. This little town suggests Obama has indeed assembled “the most diverse coalition of Americans we’ve seen in a long, long time,” as he put it. It's now set to include Senator Edward Kennedy. If that growing coalition is beyond race, as I believe, rather than vulnerable to race, as the Clintons seems to have bet, South Carolina will prove no aberration.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/28/opinion/28cohen.html?hp

Glowing and gushing, ain't it?

a generational movement for change