On history

My friend DarkSyde makes an important point:

The cliche is, 'we are watching history being made.' But that's not quite it, not tonight, not for us. We are part of making history. We will remember this evening for the rest of our lives.

This primary season stretched over months, and hit every state. Every Democrat, and quite a few non-Democrats in states with open primaries or caucuses, had a chance to weigh in. And for the first time ever, we as a party have put forward an African-American as the nominee to be the next president. That's stunning, in its own right. In November, he'll be only 47, a year older than Theodore Roosevelt was when he won his first presidential election (as an incumbent, having assumed the presidency after McKinley's assassination). He'll be only three years older than JFK was when he was elected president, and a year older than Bill Clinton was when he won in 1992.

What company he'll be in! Each of those men led the United States into a new era. Roosevelt led the nation onto the world stage, establishing America as a world power. Kennedy showed that calm and rational engagement by leaders and citizens could help soften the Cold War, averting nuclear war over the Cuban missiles, and sending young Americans across the globe through the Peace Corps, while bringing foreign students to study in America, so they could bring that training, and a vision of what America stands for, back to their developing nations.

And Bill Clinton set America's course after the Cold War ended. It was a time of tension between a desire to use our new status as the sole superpower to improve the lot of genocide victims in the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda and elsewhere, against the natural aversion to colonialism and military adventure that was the legacy of Vietnam, and of attempts to disentangle America from the colonial system that stretch back to Teddy Roosevelt.

Those challenges, plus the horrific consequences of George Bush's Bitchin' Iraqi Adventure, still plague us. Al Qaeda (a group initially crafted out of mujahideen we funded during the Cold War) hangs on in Afghanistan and Pakistan, areas that remain unstable because of the vagaries of the Cold War, and ignored in the post-Cold War era. A genocide still rages in Sudan and atrocities continue in Burma. Both are difficult to address without spurring conflict with China, and both are complicated by the world's dependence on fossil fuels.

The next president, Barack Obama, faces big challenges, and solving them will make his name even more prominent in history books. But as with the historic victory tonight, it will not be done alone. This victory was won through community organizing and through grassroots efforts. That infrastructure won't go away, and we'll keep building on those connections and friendships. We're not done making history.