THE MYSTERY OF BARACK OBAMA

A few days ago, over lunch with an old friend in Washington, D.C., we were both in awe that we may well be in the middle of a momentous moment in American history – the election of Barack Obama, an African-American, as President of the United States.

Lou Nunez, as much as anyone, knows from personal experience what this means. He has spent his life in the civil rights fight, organizing several of the most important Puerto Rican advocacy civic organizations, including the Puerto Rico Coalition. In the 1980’s he was named by the U.S. President the executive director of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission.

Obama, as everyone knows, has unusual talent in saying exactly the right things and even greater talent in saying it with moving eloquence. Still, I said, when I get down to some specific issues of great importance, I disagreed with him. For instance, his opposition to the North American Free Trade Agreement and now his opposition to the U.S.-Columbian Free Trade agreement.

But as I said this, we began to ask each other: but is Obama “really” against them? Listening to him during his brilliant primaries campaign against Hillary Clinton, there was no question that he was. He hammered away at NAFTA promising that if Mexico and Canada refused to renegotiate major changes, he will do so unilaterally. Nothing could be more specific that that.

But the question goes far beyond his position on NAFTA. Several days later, a Washington Post headline read: “Obama Still Faces a Big Task in Telling People Who He Is.” The subhead reads: “Having proved he could overcome the Clinton machine, Obama must prove he can overcome questions about who he is and what he believes.”

But it is obvious that he has had an extraordinary opportunity to do so. The enormous significance of an African-American candidate, his personal charisma, the seemingly endless primaries marathon, overtaking the seemingly unbeatable Hillary, was high drama made to perfection for the voracious appetite of cable TV news.

For a year and a half he received virtual permanent, seven days a week, 24 hours a day, media coverage. After literally hundreds of thousands of stories, endless interviews, endless primaries debates, his two best-selling memoirs, is there anything about Barrack Obama that has not been written, dissected, analyzed hundreds of times?

Why, then, is there any mystery about him? Since most polls say that he is on his way to winning, is this then the one thing that can stop him? The idea that as much as Americans like him, indeed, as much as they may want to see him President, they still don’t know who he is.

But back to the conversation with Nunez. The nostalgia of how things have changed in our lifetime. I recalled my first visit to Washington in the early 1950’s. My friend Martin Fischer and I decided to spend a week there to see the monuments. I recall mentioning this to a friendly woman where I had a summer job. She looked at me with a worried face. Where will you stay, she asked. At the “Y” I said. You should have no problem, she said relieved.

What problem, I asked. She was uncomfortable in telling me that a Puerto Rican can have “problems” in Washington. Washington, after all, she said, is a “segregated city.” As it turned out, the only “problem” we had was the one all tourists have walking from monument to monument in the middle of summer: absolute heat exhaustion. But I will not forget the look on her face, reflecting the century of racial segregation in the Sothern states after the Civil War, in some ways as cruel, and at times even more devastating than the centuries of slavery.

Symbolically, it is hard to exaggerate the importance of an African-American man and woman in the White House, in what just years ago was a “segregated city” where blacks were not allowed into “white only bathrooms.”

But it is also hard to exaggerate how important it is to the U.S., and to the world, that there be no mystery. That Americans feel comfortable that Obama has answered the questions the Washington Post headline asks: who is he and what does he believe?