A Father's Promise, or, Why Barack Obama Makes Me Cry

Yes, Barack Obama makes me cry.

I’m a 34-year-old white guy, a reporter by trade. Reporters are cranky, cynical people. We go through life looking for something wrong, hoping to stumble across a major scandal or a bloody crime scene. Or both. And we assume everybody's lying to us, all the time. You learn early on, if your mom says she loves you, source it. It makes one skeptical - cynical, even - not only about the stories and sources, but about everything else, too.

After nearly two decades in the business, I switched sides and became a political professional. A PR hack, if you like. I was the source close to the investigation, the one who couldn’t be reached for comment. I watched the sausage being made. Hell, I helped make the sausage.

You’d have a hard time finding someone more pragmatic, jaded, cynical, and emotionally detached from politics than I am.

But Barack Obama makes me cry.

And I’ve recently figured out why.

My son was more purple than brown when he was born nine and a half years ago. But by the end of the first week, by the time his birthmom voluntarily relinquished her legal rights as his parent, he had cooled to a deep chocolate brown and sprouted an Ernie-the-Muppet-style afro.

Since then, I’ve had to explain the Klan and the n-word. I’ve had to call his music teacher and explain the legacy of slave songs. I’ve taught him about Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy and Nelson Mandela. For one whole summer, Glory was his favorite movie.

Of course, he’s much more than my “black kid.” He’s smart and sarcastic. I’m pretty sure he’ll win the Heisman in 2019 or so. He loves his sister – who’s white and not adopted, a pleasant surprise that came one year and two days after he did – more than anything in the world. (Woe unto any boys who look her way.) He’s respectful and places an unusual amount of importance, for a nine-year-old, on personal honor and integrity. He doesn’t really like reading unless it’s about Star Wars or Spiderman, and he often does his homework too fast because he wants to get outside and play soccer.

But we can not for a moment ignore the fact that he’s black, if only because the rest of the world doesn’t ignore it. He was very disappointed for a time because everybody looks like their parents, and he doesn’t. (His flat nose worried him more than his skin color. He wanted a pointy one like I have.) He is also very careful to refer to himself as brown, not black, because he is literally afraid that one day slavery will return and somehow being brown, not black, will keep him safer. We’re working on that one.

He’s never afraid to talk about race with his friends in the way only a kid could. Once, a couple years ago, the neighbor kid – who had been living next door and playing with my kids every day for three years – suddenly said, “Hey, how come he’s black and everybody else is white?” Before I could even think about how to respond, my son said, “Because God made me that way.” Pause. “You ever heard of slavery?”

Another time, last summer, my daughter was named “Camper of the Day” at their YMCA camp. My son, proud as can be, yelled out, “That’s my sister!” One of the other kids asked him, “How can that be your sister?” My son simply replied, “I was born in Louisiana.”

I’m sorry to go on so about my kids, but it is leading somewhere.

Nine years ago, as I clutched him to my chest and rocked him to sleep … and five years ago, when he couldn’t go to sleep unless I was rubbing his back … I used to whisper to him, even after he was asleep. “You’re a good boy,” I’d say. “You make your daddy proud. You are my firstborn son. You are my prince, and you can be anything. Anything.”

(I admit I still do that, when I’m sure he won’t find it embarrassing.)

But here’s the catch. Sometimes, silently to myself, I added two words to that promise: You can be anything, except president.

I knew he could do almost anything. Almost. I honestly remember thinking – not every night, but more than once – that I was sorry to raise him in a state that would never elect a black governor and a country that would never elect a black president.

At least, not in a timely enough fashion that he and I could enjoy it together.

Even a year and a half ago, I was pessimistic. I made both kids sit with me and watch as Barack Obama stood in front of the old Capitol in Springfield and announce that he was running for president. I told my kids – who were totally bored – that Barack Obama might be the first black president. Probably not this time, I said – I was an Edwards guy then, and back then it was a two-horse race between John Edwards and Hillary Clinton. But someday, Son, someday soon we might actually get a black president, I said, and it might be Barack Obama.

And now … well, you know where we are now.

“That brown dude,” as my son calls him, will – if we Democrats all kick in a few bucks and peel ourselves away from our blogs long enough to pound some pavement – take the helm of this great nation.

My son will turn ten years old just four days before President Barack Hussein Obama takes the oath to faithfully execute to duties of the President of the United States of America.

President of the United States of America.

Let me make one more thing clear. My son is just my son – my kind-hearted, funny, intelligent and athletically gifted son – more than he is my black son, and I support Barack Obama the man more than Barack Obama the black man. I think he’s right on the issues. I think he’s a strong leader who will bring the best team of people Washington has ever seen. (As a former political staffer, that’s what matters to me, since I know very well it’s really the staff that does everything anyway.)

But. That’s pragmatic. That doesn’t make me cry.

Barack Obama makes me cry because I feel like he’s done something profound for me, and for parents of black kids everywhere. He will, if we help him win, fulfill a promise that I didn’t believe we could fulfill. He will prove me wrong. He will prove that we do live in a country where anybody – even a black kid with white parents – can do anything. Anything, period.

And if that can put a lump in the throat of his cynical old reporter, I can only imagine what that does to the legions of my African American brothers and sisters. In fact, I can not pretend to know anything about The Black Experience. My son is wiser on such things than I. But as the father to this one handsome brown boy, I can only say thank you, Mr. Obama. And thank you, Democrats, and thank you in advance, America.