Barack Obama's Place In History

Barack Obama says he stands for a new kind of politics, and many Americans clearly approve of that message. So many, in fact, that if the junior U.S. senator from Illinois doesn't win the presidency or even prevail in what is now a dead-heat run for his party's nomination, his candidacy will still be seen as what University of New Hampshire historian Harvard Sitkoff calls "an important moment in American political history."

Important is an understatement. That a black man has mounted so successful a charge upon the nation's highest political office speaks volumes about changes that have occurred in America even since Jesse Jackson made his own impressive bids for that office in 1984 and 1988. But to attribute too much of the significance of Obama's achievement to changes in attitudes toward race is to slight the content of Obama's message. That message is the promise of a politics of unity and change--a politics that acknowledges differences of identity and interest but at the same time insists upon the need for compromise and cooperation to achieve the common good.